《Factfulness》chapter 1: the gap instinct–reading note

Factfulness

chapter 1: the gap instinct

keywords: gap instinct, divided into two, over-simplification, four level, average and spread, extreme

We all are familiar with the traditional methods to divide the world: developed country and developing country. But now, the gap between the developed country and developing country is not big as we expected before. Take the example of childred mortality, most of the countries are doing very well (not far away from US), and only a few countries are struggling in a bad condition.

Therefore, author thinks we should abandon the traditional dividing method (easy and two-side methods) and should divide the world contries into four kinds.

• first stage: 1 billion (the poorest people in the world)
• second stage: 3 billion
• third stage: 2 billion
• fourth stage: 1 billion (the richest people in the world)

Our gap instinct: we are prone to see the world/people/things as bad or good, rich or poor, useful or unuseful, there is no middle room that like the grey color between black and white. This is a easy way of thinking the world, but it’s too extreme to miss some important knowledge.

There are three main situations that we are easy to make this mistake.

• average
  As the statistics (《看穿一切的统计学》 读书笔记) told us, we should not only see the average but also the spread or error. When we say that two parameters are different, perhaps the error is very large and there is no significant difference at all. we can see the example in the books, about the math score of man and woman in US.
• extreme
  We can easy to be absorbed by the extreme resutls and phenomenon, and then over-emphasize its effect. We should see the total and not only the small part. Then we will not hate the rich (because the poor are also richer than before, perhapse increase much higher) and not think the society isn’t all bad (because we should also find the good news) and so on.
  From the statistic view, just memorize the normal distribution (Gaussian distribution), and force ourselve to see the things/world from this view.
• see from our own condition
  Many people didn’t know his/her current condition, or we can see he/she didn’t see the things/world from the total. As the author said, we are in the level 4, so we see things just from this level.

All in all, in this chapter, the author told us that we should try to avoid the easy thinking method (all things are divided into two parts, like rich/poor, good/bad, developed/undeveloped…) and should know that perhaps there isn’t a huge gap in there. we should try to see the world from a total view, and the easy-to-use tool perhaps is normal distribution (Gaussian distribution).

My note:

We can see the world from 4 levels metioned above and don’t use a black/white point. Besides that, I thought another example, we can see things from two black/white points, thenwe can divided things into four parts. For example, 《麦肯锡教给我的思考武器》读书笔记 let us think from two side: the value of the projects, and the difficuty of the projects.

The decision matrix is another example, we can divided the quesiton into four part based on whether it’s important or not and whether it’s hard or not. Then we handle the four kinds of quesions using different solutions. The matrix is a good method for us to see things better.  See the detail in reference [2].

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2018.7.14 chapter one 20 mins

2018.10.21 another 20mins and publish

2018.10.25 add my note  15mins