Sublime

I have argued above that we should look at the systems instead of looking for someone to blame when things go wrong. We should also give more credit to two kinds of systems when things go right.

Factfulness is … recognizing when we get negative news, and remembering that information about bad events is much more likely to reach us. When things are getting better we often don’t hear about them. This gives us a systematically too-negative impression of the world around us, which is very stressful.

A person who wishes to influence the decisions of governments, organisations and companies must therefore learn to speak in numbers.

in the last few decades we have managed to rein in famine, plague and war.

Your most important challenge in developing a fact-based worldview is to realize that most of your firsthand experiences are from Level 4; and that your secondhand experiences are filtered through the mass media, which loves nonrepresentative extraordinary events and shuns normality.

salesperson or an activist. Both use a lot of the same techniques: “Act now, or lose the chance forever.” They are deliberately triggering your urgency instinct. The call to action makes you think less critically, decide more quickly, and act now.

L’instinct du fossé nous fait donc imaginer une division là où il y a avant tout une palette nuancée, une différence là où il y a convergence, et du conflit là où il y a un accord.

Flaking walls keep away the richer patients and their time-consuming demands for costly treatments, allowing hospitals to use their limited resources to treat more people in more cost-effective ways.

Factfulness is … recognizing when we get negative news, and remembering that information about bad events is much more likely to reach us.