 I recently finished Factfulness, a book by Hans Rosling, a Swedish physician, academic and public speaker who managed to get Bill Gates' attention and ultimately got him to buy this book for four million students in the US in 2018. And the book is committed to deconstructing 10 instincts that keep us from seeing the world factfully. And the book is like a collection of anecdotes sprinkled with some stats to explain global trends. Ethiopia has come halfway and is moving quickly down to this corner. And it's also a huge focus on instincts because we are humans and we do have a lot of them. From the fear instinct where we pay more attention to the things that are scary, moving to something like the size instinct where numbers that stand alone can look more impressive than they really are. And sort of like the book gives us practical advice on how to fight our own natural biases. The main idea of the book is that the world has made a lot of progress over the last few decades but most people don't know about it because they have distorted views. As an example, most of us kind of underestimate how many people do you really actually live in extreme poverty. And extreme poverty is defined as living on less than two international dollars per day. And the international dollar is actually adjusted for price differences between countries and for price changes over time, i.e. inflation. And when the author says that most of us kind of underestimate how many people do you actually live in extreme poverty, in 2017 we are actually at 10%. 10% of global population live in extreme poverty. And even like the most educated people got this wrong when asked about it. Now imagine you have four income groups. One billion people on level one. And this is what we think of when we talk about very poor people. On level one, you live on less than two dollars a day and walk around without shoes. You cook your food over an open fire and you spend most of your day carrying water. This is how it works. And at night you and your kids sleep on the dirt floor. This is where you live. Now three billion people live on level two where they can make between two dollars and eight dollars a day. Getting to level two means that you can buy shoes and maybe even a bicycle so it doesn't take as long to get the water. The kids go to school and they don't have to work all day. In this case your family eats dinner on a gas stove and they don't sleep on the ground as before. Two billion people live on level three. It costs between eight and thirty two dollars to live on level three and you have running water and a fridge. At this level you probably have the money to get something like a motorbike to just like move from point A to point B and not lose that much time. And some of the kids go to high school and maybe they even finish. Our last level is level four and one billion people live on level four. At this level you spend more than thirty two dollars a day and a high school education should be enough for you to buy your own car go on vacation and do other things you want to do once in a while. And just to give like a quick peeking in the first chapter that's called the gap instinct. The author starts testing our knowledge about the world and provides thirteen questions for the reader. These are some macro level view questions such as in the last 20 years the proportion of the world population living in extreme poverty has dot dot dot or what is the life expectancy of the world today. And if you look at the stats over the last 20 years the proportion of like people living in extreme poverty has halved and this is kind of revolutionary. And this is sort of like a basic fact you can google and maybe you should kind of know about the world and integrate it into your awareness system and we have 10% of our population actually knowing about this stuff. And I feel that learning and knowing about this matters not just because it gives me a more positive lens through which I can see the world but also because I try to base my decision making process on correct facts. And even the author doesn't label himself as a pessimist or optimist but a possible list. It means someone who neither hopes without reasons nor fears without reason. As a possible list I see all this progress and it fills me with conviction and hope that further progress is possible. This is not optimistic it is having a clear and responsible idea about how things are. It is having a worldview that is constructive and useful. And remember that things can be bad while still getting better. Millions of people are living in extreme poverty today but billions of people have escaped in the past. Of course we tend to see the world in a negative fashion not just because the rise of social media and fake media in the internet as a whole. But also due to our cognitive biases our systematic errors in thinking that occur when our brain attempts to essentially simplify the information around us and make it more digestible. Cause yeah like our brain is kind of designed to pay attention to the negative stuff. One of the reasons behind it is due to the fact that we have been trained to do it by our mere evolution as a species. For example a turbulence on a plane can be truly scary for our emotional brain who wants to assure its survival. But a rational brain will see through the fog and look at the data we have only to conclude and acknowledge that plane crashes are rare and the death rate from airplane crashes has been decreasing for years. Now as far as Anderson the author worked on the book until his last days. Even bringing chapters with him while he was in the ambulance going to the hospital and his son and the author in law essentially helped him finish the book. Maybe this tells me something more about the importance the author allocated to this last piece of his final work. I take comfort in the fact that one area in which the world has unquestionably improved is our collective knowledge. As a collective we know more than we did previously and as individuals we now have the opportunity to learn more than ever before. And remember that most humanities miracles happened long term.