Factfulness

I remember teaching from Hans Rosling, professor of international health, about how we score worse than chimpanzees in answering global trends. Not terrible enough? Gosh, that's worse than random. In spite of the hard fact that people living in extreme poverty has halved over the last 20 years, more than 90 percent of online polls perceived that the extreme poverty rate has either doubled or remained more or less the same.

In short, we don't see how things are getting better.

What exactly, then, leads us astray in getting a correct worldview? Our negativity instinct. That's an instinct to notice the bad more than the good.

It turns out that I'm not immune to such instinct. I assure you, because I had made the same mistake yesterday, that humans are more likely to notice the dips than the overall improvement. I was reminiscing the "good old days" with my nurse friend. Little did I know that we were quite tempted to glorify our early experience: our instinct to feel that we were much more competent than our colleagues nowadays. This perception, luckily, too often is an illusion.