Read Online Factfulness Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World and Why Things Are Better Than You Think Audible Audio Edition Hans Rosling Richard Harries Anna Rosling Rönnlund Ola Rosling Recorded Books Books

Product details Audible Audiobook Listening Length 8 hours and 51 minutes Program Type Audiobook Version Unabridged Publisher Recorded Books Audible.com Release Date April 3, 2018 Whispersync for Voice Ready Language English, English ASIN B07BFDCWZP

Factfulness Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World and Why Things Are Better Than You Think Audible Audio Edition Hans Rosling Richard Harries Anna Rosling Rönnlund Ola Rosling Recorded Books Books Reviews

• Listen to his TED talk and save yourself the cost of this book and the environment the cost of the tree used to make it and the fossil fuel used to send it to you. The author is a complete narcissist and insulting in his tone. Every few pages has a paragraph that begins something along the lines of “Not long ago I was invited to the five-star Balmoral Hotel in Edinborough to present to a gathering of capital managers and their wealthiest clients”, or “At the end of my opening lecture in my 1998 course in global health...”, or “I was lecturing at Karolinska Institutet...”, or “There I had spent two days using my hands to diagnose hundreds of patients with a terrible, un-explained disease [MUST HAVE BEEN A VERY BUSY TWO DAYS!]...”, or “The first time I lectured to the staff of the world bank, I told them [AND IF I’M LECTURING THE WORLD BANK, THEN I MUST BE REALLY SMART AND HAVE REALLY IMPORTANT STUFF TO SAY!]...”
  After reading this tedious book that could be summarized in a couple of charts, or 17” TED talk, I think if I were seated next to Hans Rosling on an airplane [FIRST CLASS, OF COURSE!], I’d be searching for an empty seat in tourist class, next to the bathrooms. Or a parachute. Or maybe just jump.
• I bought this book after seeing Bill Gates recommendation, and I have been really enjoying it. It goes a long way towards explaining human cognitive behavior in the face of today's "us vs. them" social media environment, as well as more historical cases where people just have a really hard time accepting the fact that things are almost always better than they think they are, and the extremes are much rarer than most people would guess.
  
  It ought to be required reading at the high school level IMHO.
  
  It's very well written and readable (the author is famous for his Ted talks on the subject). He really wants to help everyone understand and learn how to better evaluate what they hear about the world.
  
  A couple notes you can download a whole chapter of the book from Bill Gates web site if you want to read more of it in advance. The version is currently broken on some devices (at least my Chromebook running the Android app) where it won't render any page contents properly unless you tap to zoom out to the page browsing mode where it does look correct.
• Hans Rosling explains how media bias, ideological preconceptions and statistical illiteracy makes most people (in rich countries) believe in a gloomy and spectacularly wrong worldview. The book carefully explains by data and vivid examples how positive developments are systematically underreported, while disaster news are vastly over-reported. Rosling categorise the 10 most important sources of bias and misconceptions as well as explaining strategies on how to avoid them.
  
  This book is a treasure trove of evidence based reasoning, global statistics and myth busting! I read it just after finishing Steven Pinker's Enlightenment Now The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress. These books have a lot in common, both in goal and tone, but I enjoyed Rosling's book much more.
  
  Unless you have watched Roslings famous lectures (available on TED and Youtube), this book will forever change the way you understand global health, demography and development.
• I read Steve Pinker’s Enlightenment Now prior to reading Factfulness, primarily because I got Pinker's book first. But I’m glad that it happened that way. Though I enjoyed Enlightenment Now, I think Factfulness drives home the same message that our world is truly making positive progress, but with such gripping real world observations that it almost reads more like Dr. Hans Rosling’s memoir.
  
  Dr. Rosling’s stories of working as a medical doctor in some of the countries that many Westerners would lump under the stereotype of an impoverished “Third World” are as real as it gets. His stories from the field illustrate the devastating results that our ignorance and biases can create. But others so clearly show the progress we, as a species, have made as a result of our better understanding of the facts.
  
  I would definitely recommend reading both Enlightenment Now, for a more academic and research-based perspective, and Factfulness, for its memorable stories that drive home the need for fact-based thinking.