Do you really understand the World

Good thinking series-1

Imagine you open the news channel and the breaking news is: Flight BA0016 from Sydney arrived in Singapore Changi airport without any problems. You are like WHAT!!!!!!!!

It will be like you going to the latest edition of fast and furious and discover in this movie there are none of the lead actors and all they have made is a documentary about how to drive safely and follow traffic rules. My guess is you won’t be interested. Will you?

Think about the world we are living in right now. What comes to mind?

Do you think we are living in an increasingly hostile world, a world that is getting a worse place to live? War,Violence,Natural disasters,Man-made disasters,Corruption. Things are bad, and it feels like they are getting worse, right? The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer, and the number of poor just keeps increasing, and We will soon run out of resources unless we do something drastic. At least that’s the picture that most of us see in the media and carry around in their heads. And it’s stressful.

If you were nodding your head, thinking it indeed is getting worse each passing day. It’s time to pause right there because the world is nothing you imagine it to be. What if I tell you today’s world is better off than what it was just a generation or two ago.

But first, let’s have a glimpse of what has been happening in history. Human sacrifice, Cannibalism, Infanticide, Chattel slavery, Heretic burning, Torture executions, Public hangings, Debt bondage, World war. It only took one Stalin to wipe out twenty million people in the Soviet Union. Most of the world was under slavery until the middle of the last century. No freedom of expression, the right to equality, the right to live as you please.

But when was the last time you witnessed any of these things happening around you. The world not so long ago was very unpredictable.

How do you compare yourself from 20 years ago? Do you feel any noticeable change in your circumstances? The village I was born in had one TV. From getting my own TV and watching one channel we now have infinite channels. From a few people in my village finishing basic education to almost everybody completing higher education. From women with one default option of being a housewife to everyone now working and expressing their creativity one way or the other.

How much do you understand the world?

In 2017 nearly 12,000 people in 14 countries were asked to answer a set of questions about our current state of the world. They scored on average just two correct answers out of the first 12. A stunning 15 percent scored zero.

And these questions were not asked from just random people on the street, questions were asked to people from all walks of life: from teachers to eminent scientists, from investment bankers to journalists, from business leaders to Nobel laureates. It is not a question of intelligence. Everyone seems to get the world devastatingly wrong. Epidemiologist Hans Rosling who has researched this extensively and also written the book Factfullness says “If for each question I wrote the alternatives on bananas and asked chimpanzees in the zoo to pick the right answers, just by the fact of the random probability of 1 right answer out of 3 options Chimps would have done better than our well-read and news watching respondents.”The reason was that the respondents consistently picked answers that were too pessimistic.

Here are some facts about our world that you might not know.

Poverty: Over the past twenty years, the proportion of the global population living in extreme poverty has halved. This is absolutely revolutionary. It is one of the most important changes that have happened in the world in our lifetimes.

Health: Almost all children are vaccinated in the world today. This is amazing. It means that almost all human beings alive today have some access to basic modern health care. Crippling diseases like smallpox and polio are mentioned in the past tense.

Life: A century and a half ago, the human lifespan was thirty years. Today, it is 72, and it shows no signs of leveling off.

War: The most destructive human activity, war between powerful nations, is out-of-date. Developed countries have not fought a war for seventy years. Civil wars continue to exist, but they are less destructive than interstate wars and there are fewer of them.

Globally, the annual death rate from wars has been in bumpy decline, from 300 per 100,000 during World War II, to 0.2 in recent years. Even the horrific civil war in Syria has only budged the numbers back up to where they were in 2000.

Freedom: Despite backsliding in this or that country, the global democracy index is at an all-time high. More than 60 percent of the world’s population now lives in open societies, the highest percentage ever.

Knowledge: In 1820, 17 percent of people had basic education. Today, 82 percent do, and the percentage is rapidly heading to a hundred.

Gender equity: Global data show that women are getting better educated, marrying later, earning more, and are in more positions of power and influence.

Truth is every year the average person on the planet is growing wealthier, healthier, happier, cleverer, cleaner, kinder, freer, safer, more peaceful…and more equal.

Does this mean we have solved every problem in the world? For God’s sake, we are going through a global pandemic right now and with no end in sight. And there is a long way to go.

But not being aware of things that have improved in the last couple of centuries or ignoring them is like saying since babies can’t stand on their legs during the first year we might as well give up the effort since by this standard babies might never be able to walk let alone run in future.

Why is so much progress not known to people in general? How can so many people be so wrong about so much? How is it even possible that the majority of people score worse than chimpanzees? Worse than random!

What is happening here?

Here’s a funny thing: most improvements are gradual, so they don’t make the news. Bad news tends to come suddenly. Car crashes make the news. Decreasing child mortality doesn’t.

In 2016 a total of 40 million commercial passenger flights landed safely at their destinations. Only ten ended in fatal accidents. Of course, those were the ones the journalists wrote about: 0.000025 percent of the total. Safe flights are not newsworthy. We are subjected to never-ending cascades of negative news from across the world: wars, famine, natural disasters, political mistakes, corruption, budget cuts, diseases, mass layoffs, acts of terror.

Is the media to blame entirely? Sure, the media plays a role, but we must not make them into the ultimate villain because there is more to the story.

Why does it happen?

Look at the two horizontal lines below. Which line is the longest?

You might have seen this before. The line on the bottom looks longer than the line on the top. You know it isn’t, but even if you already know, even if you measure the lines yourself and confirm that they are the same, you keep seeing them as different lengths.

The human mind is vulnerable to illusions, biases, and fallacies. Several of these mental bugs fool us into believing that the world is in decline or in existential danger and always has been. That’s why we fear shark attacks and plane hijackings when what we should fear is falling down the stairs and texting while driving. This is because illusions don’t happen in our eyes, they happen in our brains.

What to do about it?

Knowing that most people are deluded means you don’t need to be embarrassed. Instead, you can be curious: how does the illusion work? The cure for cognitive fallacies is data and critical thinking.

What can you do?

Adopt a fact-based world view. Factfulness, like a healthy diet and regular exercise, can and should become part of your daily life. You will make better decisions, stay alert to real dangers and possibilities, and avoid being constantly stressed about the wrong things.

Some critical thinking rules will help.

1) The world is rarely operating in extremes like having only 2 classes of people rich & poor. In reality, the vast majority are neither rich nor poor but somewhere in the middle.

2) Refrain from making people good or bad. Truth is everyone can be good or bad depending on a lot of factors and the incentives driving them.

3) Remember bad news is much more likely to reach us than good news. The good news is almost never reported. So the news is almost always bad. When you see bad news, ask whether equally, positive news would have reached you.

4) When you are afraid, you see the world differently. Make as few decisions as possible until the panic has subsided.

5) Compare. Numbers look big in isolation. Single numbers on their own are misleading and should make you suspicious. Always look for comparisons.

6) Recognize that a single perspective limits our imagination, and it is always better to look at problems from many angles to get a more accurate understanding and find practical solutions.

Remember step-by-step, year-by-year, the world is improving. Not on every single measure every single year, but as a rule. Though the world faces huge challenges, we have also made tremendous progress and this is the fact-based worldview.