hey guys you're listening to the wise words book club where we scale down some of the best non-fiction books and we give you their key ideas we teach you how to apply them to the real world and how to benefit from them so if you're looking to improve or looking to grow then why not listen to some wise words words that make you wise so today we're going to be discussing factfulness um it's a book that me and you have both read probably i don't know maybe a year ago two years ago i don't know how long it's been out to be honest um and it was something that we we both really enjoyed at the time um but we didn't really quite grasp why it was important or we did but we it just wasn't maybe so relevant to our lives but now with obviously the chronovirus and the blacks lives the mata movement et cetera it's kind of become more and more uh interesting and relevant to maybe the world that we're living in now so um i mean there's those ten instincts talked about in the book i don't know if you wanted to start with one of those or if you just wanted to start with like a yeah i think like well i'll start with um and just his overall point of like so his introduction to the whole book is basically about our worldview and how we perceive the world and how it's currently um uh it's it's never updated and so if we ever try to make a decision or a guess or a choice about anything we're using outdated um knowledge and so the idea is that you need to update this knowledge because until you do everything's going to be inaccurate and you're not going to get the most accurate answer that you're looking for and that's why he talks about these 10 instincts because how to make it the most accurate way to look at something how to assess information and be able to like apply it properly so he gives us a 10 instincts that sort of almost holding us back right and he's like these are the these are the thought processes or the instincts that you have when you initially hear information which are just basically going to skewer your worldview to something that isn't exactly correct yeah um i think one of the most revealing things like like you're saying the very introduction um he basically offers i think it is in the intro actually um he does like a test i think he's ten questions or something yeah um and he's basically got the statistics of all the people he's given this test to because he always starts his presentations with tests and he's been talking to like un sort of world leaders uh scientists etc and he's found out that actually chimps do better on the test in general just do like multiple choice uh which is absolutely mental and i think he he talks about this idea that like um you wouldn't use a gps in your car right um in the wrong city so obviously we live in bristol it's like using the gps for london and then trying to drive around but he claims that's what the policy makers and politicians are doing when they try and solve problems with the wrong wrong facts and he's like how could this many people be that ignorant um and and then then he tries to explain why obviously these people are also wrong and don't get me wrong it's not just the the elites almost the people are so supposedly intelligent is actually everybody like nobody in general really outperforms these um chimpanzees and it's and i think his main one of his main thesis wasn't even the fact that it's because we're all dumb it's not that it's because we are weighing up the wrong things and we're focusing on the wrong uh wrong areas and like the fact that these are called ten instincts are basically it it assumes that you know this is this is natural this is the way you would look at things this is how our brains are programmed but the thing is is that you know instead of wasn't a program for truth right yes the way i think of it we're not programmed for truth a program for sort of cooperation and almost like jumping to conclusions i think it's daniel kahneman exactly exactly so you know it's not it's not whether like you're stupid or not if you don't know the literacy rates of like you know the population but it's just that like you would you would it would be so outdated because we made this judgment ages ago when we had outdated knowledge and so the whole idea is we need to update that so that then we can make these um be aware of these ten instincts and the first one like he talks about is um is the gap instinct so like he talks a lot about um we have a very binary way of looking at things you know it's either left or right or in this case it's rich and poor or the west and the east well the developed and undeveloped i think it's his famous example yes yeah exactly and the problem is is that when you look at things on such a spectrum what when you don't look at things on a spectrum but you look at just the extremes you miss everything in the middle you know you're only looking at the like very extreme examples yet realistically not everyone's you know um incredible like an incredible poverty and yes an uber billionaire it's not the case yeah sure i think i feel like yeah when you compare like the poorest of the poor to the rich the wrist of course is a massive gap but you're looking at the two extremes right yeah um and i think his main point is what you're just saying it's it's the middle is actually a lot bigger than you think like there's a lot of overlap in the middle a lot of people are in the middle so you should actually be comparing most people in the middle to maybe the extreme at the top and maybe the stream at the bottom right that's that's where the comparison should be made um yeah i thought it was really interesting well the thing is is that you can't you can't if if i take the most extreme example of the rich and most extreme example of the poor if i try to get an average okay that it will just be the middle and the middle is not a representative of the average because there could be you know three quarters of the world more towards the rich area than the poor area yet if i take the middle um as the average then it's going to be inaccurate i think another thing he was talking about is just like averages give you some sort of um idea of where the out sorry where the sort of middle of this sort of spectrum is but yeah they're not the beowndo yeah because like you're just saying right you could have 10 people sat in a room what's the average net worth if there's one billionaire in there the whole thing's skewed completely to yeah so yeah it's just interesting for me it's more like people don't really think it's just like we just take these sort of numbers averages or this gap and we just immediately think right it's unjust is unfair we just assume that's the case um and the thing is is that we're overlooking so many examples in the middle of it you know um and like we we are creatures that love novel information and the most novel information is like memorable information things that are outside the norm and so in this case you're normally going to remember someone who's got 10 billion dollars over a guy that's got 10 million dollars you know because it's the it's more extreme but we and we're also forming the wrong comparisons right so we're comparing like a billionaire with some um starving family in africa let's say right we're comparing this massive injustice um when in reality that is not that's not really the comparison group really is it in my head yeah exactly and so he what thing is like the way he um says that we should look at the world is through four income levels that we split it into four not just you know the rich and the poor but break it down and then what each income level means did you um did you take much away from them in terms of the four income levels yeah i thought it was really interesting to to understand that like i think he talks about level four being anybody over like 36 dollars a day i think it could be a bit more than that but that's like the majority of everybody in the west um so basically i think what i took away was this idea of absolute poverty relative poverty like we we see people in the us the uk and we think or they're they're poor but in reality it's that's relative poverty because they still have they still have things that people in absolute problem uh poverty don't um we're talking here like uh water we're talking here like the ability to feed themselves et cetera right yeah um i just thought it's just mental how we're still so skewed in the idea of undeveloped and developed worlds when in reality the majority of the stuff we call underdeveloped or undeveloped worlds actually um almost at the same level as developed now yeah um yeah and it's just it's back to what you said like people don't we learn all this stuff in school but the thing is you're learning i thought that's the that's the phrase of telling about a coin that's like snapshot thinking you've taken a snapshot in time and then you just pretended that snapshot's still relevant now it's like taking a picture of you as a kid and then like like almost extrapolating from that picture and saying that's me now right things are always changing so why are we still using the same old ideas that back in the day maybe they were on developed nations and when we were learning in school they were underdeveloped right but stuff changes quick but exactly exactly like look at our parents our parents are perfect examples of this where they will generalize about something that you know uh like china is a third world country like you know back in the 60s or whatever but obviously so much has changed since then but people could make assumptions to just assume that like and you know make choices regarding that information and it's so outdated um yeah this this level of outdating is just is yeah i guess the argument is people are quite lazy they don't really want to have to update their knowledge all the time but kind of what i reckon one of the main points in this entire book was uh the only way to know to know things and actually be sort of fact-full as he as he puts it is to be consistently updating it i wonder if it's related to the sort of dunning-kruger effect in in regards to like you know most of these people they have like they don't think about this stuff all the time realistically um you know the population of a certain country the literacy rates those kinds of things so if they have like one answer then that makes them more confident in it and so they just assume that you know it hasn't changed or they don't ever question it because it's just something that they don't think about much so it's it's not like it's not to me that they're stupid or anything like that it's just the fact that they're more confident in it and so they don't question these things ah i think this has brought a really relevant point as well mate it's um this is in my head right so what is the main source of information for people right in terms of these the world okay what is the main it's the media right the news media yeah yeah and they did they never cover progress they're always covering problems so um one of his points was if you don't update your knowledge it blinds you to like all the transformations happening around the world and of course you're blinded to the transformations that are happening around the world when all you see is like wars you see famine in like for example i think it's in yemen now there's a famine going on right um and that's all you ever see so you always just think oh wow these guys are really bloody struggling like nothing good's happening in the world and i think one of his interesting points was like um this is gonna go on to another instinct it was i think i think it's the size instinct and it's the idea that if you get given a number you need to put that number in perspective so he was like okay there's about 4.1 million babies that died um in i can't know what country it was right and then he was like but what you should be asking is like what was that statistic 10 years ago and what is that statistic in comparison to the population and apparently what it was is that was the death rate of babies obviously and that is three percent of the population whereas before it was 15 over the course of 10 years so it sounds like a really high number but progress has been made and there's no news story going oh wow in 10 years the the death of babies has gone down 12 it's always just like oh 4.1 million babies died what a travesty without explaining the fact that it's got better if if a reporter is trying to grab our attention and something isn't very interesting realistically they're going to they're going to try to make it more important or try to make it like overvalue it so that we overvalue it so that it actually grabs our attention and that's a perfect example in like the size the size instinct because it's like if you leave a number by itself it has nothing to compare it to you know it you can't like you said you know if you're comparing it to 10 years ago 4.1 million to 5 million is very different but you wouldn't know that if you didn't have another number to compare it to the comparison gives something its actual value but without it we overvalue it what gives it it gives it a meaning right because you can you can put it in perspective what does it mean right a number by itself doesn't mean anything we just have to accept its face value yeah you might be like wow that sounds like a lot like it does 4.1 million babies obviously that's an absolute um travesty isn't it it's that's that's a very large number but if you look at like the change it's decreasing and it's getting better yeah and it's like i don't know if you're ever gonna get to this point where it's gonna be perfect right because stuff happens that's outside of our control but at the same time it's like the problem is with the media because obviously you never hear these these progress stories because it's not news good news is not news bad news is always news what we now have is this like idea that everything is way more he talks about it like the over dramatic world view where everybody sees everything it's more dramatic than it actually is and the news is just creating these gaps or creating these exceptional um or it covers exceptional events and makes it look like that's the norm whereas the norm is inherently boring i was having this discussion with my sister earlier who was doing history and i was just like well history is just all the exceptional like in history all you study is wars you don't study the day-to-day living which is why that book you're reading on habits is quite interesting of the past or the day routine because that's actually what normal life was like not the exceptional bits yeah no exactly it wasn't a war every single day well it probably was at some point but yeah and the thing is is that you know like we're talking about progression obviously reporting has gotten better you know there's there's more access to to coverage and everything like that which gives the illusion that the world is getting worse because you can see more of it you know but realistically things can be bad but are getting better i think that's one of his like sort of quotes in it things can be bad but they can be getting better you know um and it's so true like you know you can see um um i don't know a problem in the world but you know if you were to go back 20 years ago 30 years ago how would it compare would it be better or and i think realistically it would in some aspects obviously this isn't the given for everything um oh that you just really reminded me so that was a really really interesting point he made about uh global warming slash climate change and how the us was blaming china based on their total emissions okay and the same with india they were like right your country are producing the most amount of total emissions okay and obviously that sounds really bad but then you realize what's their population okay and what his point was if you divide the total emissions by the population per person they are admitting less carbon dioxide than america and basically america pending us all of them with the biggest total but this hotel doesn't mount when it's of such obviously a vast population yeah um and i just never thought of it that way and it makes a lot of sense that it that it should be measured per person rather than as a total nation because obviously if like you've got a really small country and it's producing absolutely tons per person then obviously they're not doing it very efficiently right if you kind of get me england's brother i'm terrible really it'll be interesting to see but but once again it's been like the gdp actually gdp is per person isn't it per capita sorry but like if the measurement isn't done per person it's not actually that useful yeah because obviously you could say like a disproportionate amount of people are producing something if you're going to get me or i don't know it's once again numbers aren't the the truth it's just a way of trying to sort of view a problem yeah well like it thing is like you can't take everything from just numbers you need to look at the context that the numbers are talking about you know um because the context is what matters otherwise you end up overlooking it and just making generalized statements i i think i liked his idea so he says like when you see a lonely number in a news report um you should ask yourself a few questions so what should this number be compared to what was this number a couple of years ago 10 years ago what is it what is this number in a comparable country or region and what should it be divided by i.e should it be divided by the population etc yeah um because i thought it's quite interesting it's like it's the same with like let's just say they they report oh there's been an increase in crime um but are they taking that from a specific location or what they can what they comparing it to last year they're comparing it to 10 years ago right it needs to be specific yeah and i feel like we always panic oh wow the crime rate went up one percent this year but if you look at the overall trajectory it's gone up it's gone down 10 over 10 years right and it's a bit like the stock market it's not going to be clean it's not just going to be going up all the time is it up and down up and down up and down but as long as the trajectory is right this is back to like it can be it can be bad but be getting better like obviously the crime rate's still bad if it's still happening but it could be getting better yeah exactly exactly perfect example i think like that he talks about this in like the negative instinct um where we actually have a problem of like uh comparing things to the past because we forget the past and when we when we end up um when we're approached with bad news or when bad news is alerted to us what we end up doing is not thinking rationally we end up thinking um emotionally you know our amygdala is triggered and so what happens is because of that we're not thinking about the past okay so the only thing is like we're thinking about this current event and we have nothing to compare it to and so it seems much worse than it actually is um but we need to be able to remain rational and like be able to think about the past and see whether it's better you know um if there was a reducing dentistry um hygiene this year we could go back 250 years ago and say well you know it's much better but that's that's the thing it's like we don't we don't ever when we approach with bad news we don't look into the past to compare once again numbers in my head numbers aren't sexy but like um weird dramatic events are sexy and that's the problem um bad events are always the thing that reach us because that's what we're scared of almost is like get attention because that's what the fear-based reality almost well it goes it goes through our filter and like thing is is that it also anchors us to it like you know if we haven't come across a certain um uh certain thing that the news is reporting then that's our anchor to it that's our first piece of information about that kind of event and if it's negative which most the time it is on the news then you know we're going to have a negative perspective of something rather than looking at the whole picture what did you take away from the fear instinct then um so the fear the fear instinct was very similar in my head to the negativity it's more this idea of we're being uh so yeah we're being manipulated kind of in a way from the media because of we're really our attention is really drawn to what we're fearful of um so this is what one of the things he said it says the image of a dangerous world has never been broadcast more effectively than it is now well the world has never been less violent and more safe so fears at once help keep our ancestors alive today help keep journalists employed i like that it's just so true um it really is so he talks about this the type of fears that were always covered in the news right so one of them's physical harm so violence caused by people animals sharp objects or nature so that's everything from domestic oh well like that was gonna say domestic abuse but terrorist attacks bear attacks shark attacks tornadoes earthquakes right that's the physical harm that's what we're scared of that always gets covered captivity so loss of control loss of freedom think about some of the the movements at the moment um it's all about the idea that our freedoms are being limited et cetera which in some cases they are don't get me wrong but it's always about this loss of it so feeling captive then this is idea of contamination so invisible substances i can infect a poisonous talk about like all the research into pesticides um etc stuff like vaccines and people still don't have made their mind up on these sort of issues right and the whole point there is to scare us to think oh wow like is that actually bad and kind of i quite like one of his points is like we are really we are really scared of like this idea of chemicals in food but in reality everything is a chemical because everything is molecular deep down and he his argument is is like at the end of the day it's all about the dosage so like if you drink 10 gallons of water you got to um it's just and it's the same for these kind of like so-called poisonous pesticides etc i'm sure obviously over the course of lifetime eating again again and again it does damage but what i'm saying is it takes a big dose of it to actually really hit you and we're so scared of these things which are minutes and have been shown to cause damage but in reality don't actually cause as much damage as you think which is another interesting point he made but that's back to the fear thing so it's always about like death it's always about physical harm it's about yeah yeah i think i think because so for instance like bad information or like bad events they're threats and threats are like lost we're about to lose something so if we're about to like if we apply this to like loss of versions loss aversion meaning that like um we're more sensitive to losses than get we are sensitive to gains yeah exactly exactly um and so if we have this then basically we it goes through our filter we're much more sensitive to it we're much more sensitive to than say like someone had a good day at work today you know you're not gonna really bat an eye about that um and so what happens is because this actually gets through our filter rather than this guy had a good day at work it means it becomes the norm and so we assume that this stuff is recurring all the time you know that like you know um uh terrorist attacks are happening all the time because you know we've heard about a couple of them um and that's the thing it's like we we associate bad things or things that we hear on the news because it gets through our attention filter and then we project that as if it's the norm when realistically it's very much not because you're not seeing everything else that is going on um if a plane crashes like i remember when the um uh when the malaysian airlines flight went down and then there were like three three flights in one month that went down or something because i was over in australia at the time and naturally you start to think like hell if air travel's like really dangerous oh my goodness like so many things have like um crashed the next flight i get on and how safe is it all these things because you just assuming that it's becoming the norm when realistically you know air travels uh safer than car travel yeah i mean i think the statistics in the book he talked about their travel was like zero point zero zero zero zero zero like two five percent it's so ridiculous where you see it and you're just like wow if that's really the sort of fatalities from air travel then yeah don't get in a car um i think another interesting point based on this was what i said to you before this is the frightening and dangerous being two different things so something frightening is something that poses a perceived risk so something that isn't really actually a risk to you but it's a perceived one right and something dangerous poses a real risk but what happens with the news is we pay too much attention to what's frightening rather than what's dangerous so my example this would be what's frightening right an earthquake a shark attack a bear attack um something exceptional terrorist attack for example what's what's actually dangerous right over eating dying through diabetes or obesity smoking these are dangerous they pose real risks um well i think he has a um a formula for risk which is like what risk equals danger times exposure you know it's like whether you're exposed to it or not yes like shark attacks are bad but unless you're going into the water every single day where there are sharks then you know you're not really exposed to it yes it's almost like why extreme sports are actually dangerous because yeah the more exposure you have is a bit like climbing everest right you can climb it as many times as you want apart from the time when you fall down and die so like each time you expose yourself to it like it's like playing russian roulette i think it was that's like with yeah six bullets you wouldn't play it six times would you because you're obviously guaranteed to die so actually that's i think that's true is it maybe not but you've got good luck advice yeah yeah yeah um um but yeah fear basically gives the illusion that it's dangerous where that's not always the case you have to take it into consideration like how exposed you are to um i try to think what so we've covered yet fair negativity um because i straight line do you want to yeah the straight line i think the straight line is quite interesting it's the idea that we with for example i think his his example in the book story was about population growth it was we we tend to think we see like a straight line going up in terms of the population growing year on year and we just think it's going to continue like that forever but then he poses the idea that um what's actually happening to the population at the moment is there are more as you would call underdeveloped countries which are actually becoming more developed now anyway so um who are having less children uh so the parents are having less children so what's actually happening is the the steepness or this idea of a straight line of population growth is actually starting to curve over um because people are having less kids um and it's just this idea that we always think when we see something going up and up and up that it's going to continue going up and up and up or it's going to keep on the same trajectory that's going right now i mean coronavirus could be a great example like it's not it was it was it's not like a straight line is it that the sort of cases aren't going up is exponential but but what i'm saying is the graph right is the graph isn't a straight line that's my point it's kind of like it's curved right so nothing is almost straight the straight line is almost an illusion that we use to try and simplify things that are complex but that's exactly it it's like you know with his poverty example he said that generations like after a generation you normally move from one income level to another i think you were saying so this is done through like education so educate like an increase in education reduces poverty which reduces um the amount of children that people have but obviously there's a point at which you know back like um extreme poverty people are going to have more kids because there has there's child labor and you know there's a higher mortality rate for them um but you know as you start to move out of that you still have a lot of kids but you know realistically the mortality rate goes down and then when you get to a higher level you only realize that you need to have like two kids or like the average you know um so it slowly uh like curves off so it becomes an s and s curve i think he talks about but the fact is that the more points you have the more accurate you can like see what the gradient is and how the curve is going to react at the beginning of the corona virus it just kept increasing and it's very easy to say like this is just going to keep going until everyone in the world is going to have it but realistically those those like um the results have gone down now so i think for me it's more like when you see a line you've got to understand what's actually contributing to the increase of the line yeah um and what i mean obviously the world's way more complex and just obviously there's like one or two factors that increase it right but it's just trying to understand the relationship between the things so for example with the population it's like the relationship is the reason why it's going up is because a lot of people in um in the level one of the income group or level two are having like five to six maybe even eight kids um and then obviously as you get sort of into the sort of income level four which is the the west you're having two to three kids and as they as these people transition from the eight kids to the three the population is obviously going to curve off and not get asleep um and it's just understanding the relationship behind the line rather than just seeing a line and going okay it's increasing yeah yeah i know exactly um i think an interesting one with the straight line it reminds me of the turkey illusion from nassim to levitz like this idea that for thanksgiving they're feeding a turkey every day so the turkey would be plotting along his lot on his graph right every day i'm getting fed blah blah blah until the day he gets killed right and then it's gone so yeah we always assume we always try and extrapolate um i thought there was another really good example once as well but i think it was like um like temperature and properties like for example something melts right but if you if you just if you looked on a graph and saw between 0 and 50 degrees that thing wasn't melting you could then assume that it's going to go on to 100. but once it hits its boiling point it goes right and there's always is back this like the dosage thing it's never a straight line it's like once you get past a certain point stuff changes yeah same with energy and heat think about it yeah um but yeah that was the straight line i've i quite like the destiny instinct this idea that um the destiny instinct is saying that in innate characteristics determine the destinies of people so this is kind of like an egotistical version of or way of seeing the world it's like saying we in the west we're so or sorry like the us in particular like we're so entrepreneurial was so like self-independent that we're obviously always going to be the best country and we're always going to be the most i have the best economic growth and then you could say something i don't know what they'd say but they'd say about other countries saying oh they have these characteristics and therefore they're never going to be like us yeah um but it's it's basically taking um a pattern from the past and projecting it into the future you know if you were powerful in the past it gives you the illusion that you're going to be powerful in the future which is exactly what the west does it's very arrogant from that perspective but it's the same like we do this with a lot of cultures um in terms of you know we see how they acted and then we just assume that that's how it's going to continue for the rest of their like well for for the future um but the thing is is that when we when we we we we gather our patterns from like large events in the in the past we don't look at the small little things we look at the big changes which normally are um are made up of smaller changes so the problem is when we predict into the future we predict big changes and we overlook all the gradual change we don't look at the small little increases that a country might be doing we just assume that it's not going to be doing very well or we're going to assume that it's going to be doing great but the thing is we miss we we overlook all the gradual change yeah for sure i think the destiny instincts almost an extension of stereotypes like the common stereotypes is like right yeah it's just this idea that personality is relatively fixed and like you the characteristics of a nation are set i don't really i don't understand how you can like characterize a nation when i think one of his main points as well is like the generalization instinct right i don't think we touched on this it's like we then we take these characteristics and we just project them onto everybody within that country it's like well no there's just actually there's more variation in that country than there is people of that generalization if you kind of get me yeah yeah yeah well you need to you need to be more specific you know generalizing basically covers such a wide wide field of people or information and then we just yeah we generalize it rather than like breaking it down and look being specific about it and actually like noticing their differences rather than only categorizing them on their similarities i'll tell you what a very dangerous sentence is there's this idea of that stereotypes are there for a reason because if you if you read this book and realize that people are so capable they're capable of change right or that this destiny instinct doesn't exist almost stereotypes actually don't they're just there in our mind rather than actually the person if you kind of get me stereotypes are just our way of dealing with an incomplete information on somebody we need to fill in the gaps because we can't quite work them out so we just use past information but where do stereotypes come from fair enough maybe in the past right this idea of like jocks in high school right you know there's like that classic like any tv program you watch there's always the jocks it's the nerds and all this i it's not that clear-cut i've been to school i've seen it it's not the clear-cut there's jocks there's nerds but the problem is when you see that when but when you see that in media right you then you then start thinking using these terminology i find it really interesting and then you start judging people's like jocks and stuff but in reality that did they even exist or is that just something that comes out to just was that just an archetype now it is just an archetype oh these stereotypes what these stereotypes come from is uh um the they take an example of somebody who's similar to that and then they just make it extreme if you kind of get me yeah but the jocks aren't actually like massive bullies and bully all the nerds it's just like as you see in probably every single like tv program right but they've just really extrapolated from the idea that they because they're big and strong maybe for example they would be the ones who bully right and then what happens is that they get set in stone and people just view the world through that so if you're in college in america and you watch a lot of tv and you see a lot of programs you probably almost look through your new world through that lens yeah it's a constant cycle can you imagine if if in the media it was all about like imagine the nerds were like the kings of the college because they could use i didn't know i mean if there was like a different stereotype would they be treated better in school interesting i kind of off topic but i think it's because like you know these are these are more extreme examples and so they're more memorable and so that's how we just project all these people if we assume if we met one um jock in our life who was really stupid okay we would just assume that all jocks are stupid you know that's like the sort of stereotype that we're filling in it's the destiny we're seeing their past pattern this is the destiny instinct we're seeing their past pattern of being stupid and we just assume they're going to be stupid and then we just project that onto every jock that we make sure i think i think another an interesting parallel to what you're saying now is the same logic so the idea of like oh because there's one job that's like that they're all like that right it's the same thing so if one chemical in a food is unsafe then all chemicals are unsafe that's kind of like the same logic yeah so would you be prepared to complain yes so conclude that all chemicals are safe on the basis of one safe one so like how can you conclude that all jocks are the same when you've just seen one and obviously the ones that get your attention like you said are the ones that are the most different or the ones that stand out but how can you use the standout characteristics to explain the majority it doesn't make any sense yeah yeah it's back down to a sort of innate desire to just categorize everything because we can't really function without trying to make sense of the world like if you went to school and you didn't have these archetypes of what the kids are or what your friends are what their sort of role is in society you wouldn't be able to function because you you'd probably take in too much information it's almost like you it's almost a way of cutting off new information when you categorize you're like right he's this person right done yeah now i don't have to think about anything he does well i think that leads quite nicely into his other instinct the single perspective instinct because his idea is that it like you just said we like to categorize things you know if we have this gap of knowledge we want to fill it so that we don't have to worry about it but the thing is is that leads us to assuming that there's like only one solution you know or only one cause it's a single perspective there's only one thing that contributes to it um so if we have that if we have that outlook on the world we overlook everything else you know if we if we have one solution to something we overlook all the other solutions that we could have looked at um sure the thing i think about the single perspective is almost like i did make a note and i'm trying to find it exactly but roughly in my head it's to do with um basically if you're trained to do something or look at the world in a certain way you look at it through that lens like if you're a mathematician you look or a data scientist you look at the world for data um and like you we all have our own perspective on things and the problem is when you just have the people in charge or somebody who's trying to figure something out only looks at it from one perspective it's kind of like what you would say the argument for like against capitalism is the idea that the stocks and uh the people the head of the financial departments and the investment bankers are all trying to improve uh profitability and when you just follow one number and measure one thing you're missing out on the fact that it's actually people you're serving and what then happens is you then either increase the cost of your product to customer dissatisfaction or you then you cut costs right and you lose the the company's ability to produce i don't know as efficiently right and it's just an idea that you should basically in my head use as many lenses on the one problem as possible to look at it as a multi-variant in the sense that you don't it's not you just stop this idea of one thing causes one thing uh sorry one thing leads to another because in reality it's like a mult it's like a load of different things yeah there's multiple factors you end up overlooking them yeah yeah exactly so is the idea of looking at multiple variables to figure out what causes the problem rather than just like yeah it's not it's not quite as simple as oh right um this one thing is causing all our issues it's like right this this impacts this impacts this impacts right how can we how can we sort of address these issues yeah and i think it does depend on where you're coming from or what you're looking for and like it kind of relates to what we talked about last week in terms of metaphors you know if you're if you use a certain metaphor you're looking for one thing but you're hiding all the rest or you're overlooking all the rest and like which is basically confirmation bias we're looking for things that we want to find and then as soon as we find it we just slot that in but we we overlook everything else in the process which we want to stop we want to be able to like take in as many solutions as possible and then assume which one's the best or look at all the causes and um fix it that way well this this is the quote matt i just found it so so people with math skills get fixated on numbers climate activists sorry climate activists yeah argue for solar everywhere physicians promote medical treatment where prevention would be better well everybody has their innate biases for solutions based on the solution they provide so his idea was combined ideas compromise solve problems on a case-by-case basis and this idea of just not just looking at so yes you need the numbers to work out what's really going on yes the argument for climate change yes you need solar but solar everywhere isn't the answer right um it's the same with physicians like right okay treatment does work but it only works when this person's really ill prevention is better the majority of the time so let's stop focusing on your solutions because your solutions actually don't even treat the real problem or they're only treating one aspect of it um and it's just amazing how many people can't look at something from different perspectives and it's always just like you just said the single perspective instead you saw is it single perspective instinct isn't it yeah it's this idea that you can't even just take a step back and go like what if it was what if he weren't looking at it from this like this lens what have you tried from this lens like so right this is a number here what if what if you think about the person behind this number how do they feel like how they come into this how they come and found our company for example maybe a good example but but i think it does it i see more and more that it links to like the dunning-kruger effect that you know if you have only one solution to something then it makes you more confident in it if you had 10 solutions to something your confidence in one would like reduce a lot you know and it's only by understanding those 10 that you become more confident and you can apply a better solution you know um i think this leads in quite nicely to like the blame instinct as well because if we have this sort of outlook on the world this single core single uh solution to everything then it's very easy to have a single person to blame or a single company to blame and we see this all the time how many times do we like accuse something of happening because of someone as in like we choose one person to blame when realistically it was a number of factors you know when someone says oh um this company did that it's like is it the company like that is a fictitious belief like that's a fictitious thing who in that company and then you know it's there's so many other factors to it um but as soon as we as soon as we find someone to to blame that's our answer we slot that in and we don't have to think about it anymore we don't have to question anymore it's just it basically i said something here when we find someone to blame we create our own finish line we cut ourselves early or close the loop meaning we stop questioning and looking for any further truth but yeah you get my point um yeah for sure um i think it's i for me it reminds me of rennie rennie gerard's nomadic theory and he talks to his idea of scapegoat what we do as humans as we built as like social unrest crescendo um this is like big sort of social groups rather than just individuals and then we end up having a scapegoat and then we kill them like for example jesus would be an example um but what it is is we have this innate desire to find a closure point yeah i feel like this happens with a lot of relationships as well like this idea of closure and the blame gives you closure you find who's responsible for something and you kind of hang like you you hang them metaphorically right you lay them out to dry you blame them they're you've then ridiculed them they've their lives ruined now we move on if you're going to get me this is what social media promotes now it's like this idea of something bad's happened i can't explain it i'm really confused this is kind of what the madness of crowds talks about we've lost meaning through religion so we're now trying to find new meaning and this new meaning is this idea like something bad's happening we need to find somebody to blame so we look for somebody to blame or this boy this person said something i don't agree with therefore he's he's like promoting what just happened right he's going to be blamed and yeah then once like you just said once you've blamed somebody the finish line has been reached you're then done thinking you create your own finish line yes yes i think it's just an idea of closure and it's basically if you remember flow it's psychic entropy so it's this idea that the brain likes to have closure on things um and it will find a way to close open loops or this is open loops being like um something in your head which is keeping you awake because you can't quite understand it or you yeah you can't you need to understand why that something happened so you have to finish it and the easiest way once again is just to find somebody to blame and then say it's them it's their fault they're morally wrong they're bad um i think about how many bad tendencies we must have or like depending on our biases you know like oh we don't like a certain person so we're going to blame it on that kind of person you know um this isn't a perfect example of like hitler really with like the jews just blaming everything on this amazing essentially to me yeah it's the same thing it's literally that taken to the extreme yeah it's the point where everybody's turned around like i said to you back to serenity gerard scapegoating like the whole country's now believed that the reason why they've been held back is because of one particular issue for example with them it was the jewish race and like then like johnny's everything's pinned on them and then then it becomes everything becomes justifiable in terms of the eradication yeah um obviously he's not got this far in the world at the moment but i just see it more and more now that people are so quick to blame yeah and it's so unwilling to like take a look in the mirror and be like right how can i how can i contribute how did i contribute to this like by the way that's not me saying people are contributing to societal issues but i think on an individual basis of relationships it's very easy to like blame your significant other or a friend for something yeah you play 50 of the role in that relationship and you should have said something like people who expect you to mind read them they're like oh why didn't you care about me i obviously showed you that i was upset well no i asked you if you're right and you said yes it's like we're not i'm not putting this planet to mind read you um and if you blame me for not being attentive maybe you should just take a look at yourself and being like actually did i make it clear obvious it's quite interesting i was watching this um tv program called years and years and it's kind of like black mirror but a bit more realistic um and you know all these sort of things happen and there's this woman who says well realistically we're all to blame you know we all bought that one pound t-shirt from primark because it was only one pound we didn't need a t-shirt but we bought it for one pound even though we know that you know there are probably terrible circumstances in which they're being made like you know sweatshops and children child labour those kinds of things yeah we're aware of it yet we play a part as well you know but it's it's so easy to like put the blame of us and find someone to do it i think it's like we don't want to feel guilty and so we try and find someone else and like finding someone to blame is kind of it ends up being our goal we end up focusing on that rather than the system at hand rather than questioning the system and focusing you know the same goes for like the opposite of blame is like praising someone but normally it's not because of just one person that did something you know it wasn't just one hero it was like it wasn't just one person on the battlefield it was every soldier you know um the way you just i think you just brought up a really interesting example of how like the blame also leads to our idea of heroism like we always try and find that one cause like we're like oh wow like steve jobs great entrepreneur but you forget that like there was a company and there's thousands of people in the company who help produce the results right it's never really like the blame i guess the opposite the blame is the idea of like putting somebody on a predator and sort of praising them as a one-man band when in reality it's always way more complicated yeah we we over value them yeah of course we over-value the bad and we overvalued the good like if there's one person to blame you could argue with hitler thing as well this is pretty touchy for most people that at the end of the day although he was mad it wasn't just him everybody else would be complicit in it yeah yeah yeah he's on the pedestal but obviously other people for it were punished etc but what i mean is he's the guy he's the face the thing is we always need a face to make sense of a complicated reality yeah exactly we need to simplify it and it's much easier to have one person rather than a thousand people yeah for example like go on go on twitter and social media like the americans are like one side's blaming trump on sites i don't know what the journey but they're they're down to just trump but it's not that simple it's not just trump that's causing all their issues there's other stuff going on i think what people people are so confused to what's going wrong that they need to find a way to blame something that's almost where that instinct comes in yeah i think i think that's like such a big point out of this whole book that like you know nothing's that simple nothing's ever so simple there's complexity and if you're going to make a decision about something then you should look at the the complexity you know you can't you can't just take in this knowledge that's been so simplified and everything else has been chopped out you know um i think to understand that we need to understand the complexity sure um like and that's that's the problem i think one of the other things about this is it's just like i didn't was there one about attention as one of the instincts there's an urgency instinct okay i guess you could argue that slightly linked attention but this idea of like where you put your attention it like defines your reality so like if you're paying attention to one thing happening in the world your reality is defined by that right to a degree like if i'm thinking about all the injustice across the world i'm my mind is all about injustice and how the world isn't fair but if i focus on maybe some all the fairness and love in the world um i then my reality is much nicer right it's just and you and the thing i think people really really struggle with or or the biggest realization for me is you actually get to choose what you pay attention to like if you really focus you can choose what you pay attention to you can block out the stuff which isn't nice and people could say i'm i'm self-centered or mean for doing that but in reality you've got to take care of yourself and then everything follows sweet afterwards right and if you're in a if you're in a constant fear-based set of mind you're you're not going to be very productive or useful yeah i know i know i agree um yeah i think the touch lastly to touch on this like sort of urgency instinct because i think this does play a big part in media especially is just this idea of you know if you're a reporter once again and you need to make something sound more important than it actually is urgency is a perfect way of getting through to us it becomes you know if something's affecting us now it's a threat okay whereas if something we can't really conceive what it's like for 50 years in the future so what are you saying that we need things to be shown as more urgent or are you saying no so i'm i'm saying that like things need to be put into perspective okay so you know the the ice an ice cap won't melt in a day well actually i don't know it probably could now but um if you put it next to the sun i'm sure it would yeah but my point is is that like you know this stuff isn't happening as urgent as people are saying it is um it is you know we need to act straight away but the problem is that most people when they can't see you know the the sea levels rising then they're kind of blind to it and so they turn a blind eye yeah yeah and it's one of these things that um with the i don't know the media almost make things seem for me more urgent than they are but stuff like coronavirus is very urgent right yeah don't get me wrong but it's they almost portray things as like needing change immediately and it almost creates outrage and then you almost this is kind of why i see why this protests happen at the moment it's like everything becomes like this is an urgent problem it needs to be solved like all the time like there's never but there's never they never could cover something be like oh right okay this could be changed over the next five years because everybody wants stuff to be different now i think this idea of like back to his big point that over the over the time everything is getting better but it just takes longer than you think it's just we are inclined to want things to change immediately just because that's what and they're also living in the world we live in right because we get things so easy like you can go play video games and feel the sense of achievement and progress within minutes um we will feel like everything has to change quickly or should change quickly and therefore everything that comes to us is always pitched to us as like an urgent thing that needs attention but in reality everything's kind of unurgent really um but i feel that's just human wiring right it's kind of like we pay attention to things or we're wired to try and figure out what's urgent to us and obviously what a surgeon stimulates the um am i getting it wrong here it's not the hippocampus is it it's the amygdala it makes sorry yeah you've got yeah in terms of go straight into the limbic system straight into the fight and flight response yeah um i think i think what's really interesting and this kind of off topic from fact finish is this idea that um what i think rory suffer was saying every day like business and the way the world is set up is just one big social experiment and that through looking at what works and what's successful you can learn a lot about human nature and i think particularly this book is quite good at sort of picking out like the fact that we're all so skewed in our world views shows that our biological wiring is stopping us from seeing the bigger picture if you kind of get me yeah and it's this idea of what these instincts and how the media manipulates us the fact the media still exists and the way it does and what gets shown shows because they know what works right they know what gets attention otherwise they wouldn't still be in business so it just goes to show how hardwired some of these desires and instincts and sort of shortcuts are in the brain and i just i just find it super interesting just to look at the what's being portrayed what's being shown yeah because it just reveals so much about us as a as humans yeah like i think in realistically what would be nice is if you know people did um when reporting they were kind of obligated to um you know show the whole picture not just you know certain aspects or actually try to trigger all of us there's no obviously you know like good news realistically doesn't get published anywhere near as much as bad news you know we want to be aware of what's happening and if anything's like a threat to us you know but i think it should be put into perspective of the whole thing like you know like i said the whole picture um rather than just a fraction of it to like you know trigger us like i think we should all learn what this book has to has to say because i think it's super important especially when like you know a crisis like this it's very easy to get led astray you know and think you know it's the apocalypse that the world is ending when realistically it's not um but yeah i think both sides need to need to learn it and definitely the media needs to take on board like putting things in perspective yeah for sure um you know what let's just let's just try and recap i think for me the biggest thing about all of this right is actually the big takeaway is just put things in perspective like that is literally the one sentence i can sum this up because it's same with your gap instinct it's the same with all of it really it's like right there's a gap put it in perspective what is that gap what gap are they trying to show right it's the same with the size instinct they're giving you a big number put it into perspective what does this relate to what's this about um the fear and the negativity in things okay right we're being shown all this information that's put into perspective is that actually relevant to my life um this uh what else we have we've got the generalization instinct towards the game put it in perspective oh we think these people are so different but are they different it's just you know you're just changing the frame the way i see perspective is just changing the way you look at something yeah exactly um the destiny instinct the same thing change your perspective like is is it innate characteristics that make up a nation or is it is it actually the more sort of the environment or the technological advancements in a society right that changes it right blame instinct same thing put it in perspective is this person really meant to be blamed um basically like i think the main takeaway is just try think more yeah well i think that's that's the biggest thing like you know the fact that this is an instinct means it's impulsive it's you know a reaction from our amygdala our limbic system but what we should learn to try and do is just stop take a breath and think about it you know look at the complexity be more specific about it or look for the specifics um and that way you know you can already in a calm manner you can assess whether something is a threat or not or whether what the media is like you know reporting is a threat or not but i think yeah we have to like the opposite of instinctual like you know we need to be rational um i think one of the biggest things i've taken away from this as well is how wrong we can be systematically about our whole entire world view like and then also how we need to update our categories regularly um or update our knowledge fairly for example if you can have an opinion on a big societal issue you need to have the most up-to-date facts and knowledge and you also need to be able to compare it to the past because although there's a big problem today it doesn't mean it's not being improved every year year on year um and i think people forget that and once again you're not just going to eradicate like world poverty right it's not just going to be like okay we've solved it okay this is a this is a freaking complicated issue that people have been spending eternity trying to solve and you think now that you've gone to university and got a degree in social sciences that you've figured it all out go yeah fair play how outdated these like textbooks and everything are you know like realistically like technology is a perfect example because it's such a progressive like um area you know it's changing almost every time i think there was like something to do with is that architecture or coding and it's like as soon as they've done their three-year course there's a new there's a whole new um like way of doing it you know like the thing is it's constantly like it constantly needs to be updated so we need to be aware of that because probably the things that we learned at school are no longer you know as relevant um of course and like once again um i thought okay this is another interesting i think i don't know if this was in fact finished i think it was anyway it's about vietnam war and it was this idea that obviously the u.s called it the vietnam war and the us and the vietnam call it the american resistance war and that for me just exemplifies as well not even only school is just distorted or your education is distorted to your country's view of the world yeah yeah i mean exactly exactly that made me just realize my i have systematic errors because my country wants me to believe that the like the uk for example where we are is like we are the best country or we we were always wrong done by by europe or we were always like the victims and we've retaliated when in reality it could have been us being aggressive right and we we always seem to yeah it's one of those things that you you that's another perspective taking is like why is this actually the truth or is this just a spin that our country tells us to get us a bit more patriotic um but yeah i think i think one of the things you could almost take away and leave on with this book was the step by step year by year the world is improving not on every single measure every single year but as a rule though the world faces huge challenges we have made tremendous progress this is a fact-based world view and i love that i think it's powerful it's like so much so much we think there's so much wrong with the world and especially right now that's like the argument is everything's falling apart right but when is everything not been falling apart i feel like every year there's something that's falling apart it just depends where you're deploying your attention yeah exactly i think that's i think that's it mate i think that's um that's a wrap yeah i think that's it cool well i hope you enjoyed that guys if you did make sure you leave a comment or review and if you want to know more about 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