Seventy percent of people don’t know that the majority of mankind lives in Asia.

(By the way, that is a good general principle with statistics: be careful jumping to any conclusions if the differences are smaller than say, roughly, 10 percent.)

Only actively wrong “knowledge” can make us score so badly.

But now that we have eliminated most immediate dangers and are left with more complex and often more abstract problems, the urgency instinct can also lead us astray when it comes to our understanding the world around us.

There are three things going on here: the misremembering of the past; selective reporting by journalists and activists; and the feeling that as long as things are bad it’s heartless to say they are getting better.

Often the best thing we can do to make a large number more meaningful is to divide it by a total. In my work, often that total is the total population. When we divide an amount (say, the number of children in Hong Kong) by another amount (say, the number of schools in Hong Kong), we get a rate (children per school in Hong Kong). Amounts are easier

We tend to assume that all items on a list are equally important, but usually just a few of them are more important than all the others put together. Whether it is causes of death or items in a budget, I simply focus first on understanding those that make up 80 percent of the total. Before I spend time on the smaller ones, I ask myself: Where are

Beware comparisons of averages. If you could check the spreads you would probably find they overlap. There is probably no gap at all.

Every group of people I ask thinks the world is more frightening, more violent, and more hopeless—in short, more dramatic—than it really is.