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How Much of the Curve Do You See?
Curves come in many different shapes. The part of the curve with which we
are familiar, living on Level 4, may not apply at all on Levels 1, 2, or 3. An
apparently straight upward trend could be part of a straight line, an S-bend, a
hump, or a doubling line. An apparently straight downward trend could be
part of a straight line, a slide, or a hump. Any two connected points look like
a straight line but when we have three points we can distinguish between a
straight line (1, 2, 3) and the start of what may be a doubling line (1, 2, 4).
To understand a phenomenon, we need to make sure we understand the
shape of its curve. By assuming we know how a curve continues beyond what
we see, we will draw the wrong conclusions and come up with the wrong
solutions. That is what I did before I realized that the Ebola epidemic was
doubling. And that is what everyone is doing who thinks that the world
population is
just
increasing.
Factfulness
Factfulness is … recognizing the assumption that a line will just continue
straight,
and remembering that such lines are rare in reality.
To control the straight line instinct,
remember that curves come in
different shapes.
•
Don’t assume straight lines.
Many trends do not follow straight lines
but are S-bends, slides, humps, or doubling lines. No child ever kept
up the rate of growth it achieved in its first six months, and no parents
would expect it to.
OceanofPDF.com
CHAPTER FOUR
THE FEAR INSTINCT
How to hide 40 million airplanes, and how I kind of won the Nobel Peace
Prize
Blood All Over the Floor
On October 7, 1975, I was plastering a patient’s arm when an assistant nurse
burst through the door and announced that a plane had crashed and the
wounded were coming in by helicopter. It was my fifth day as a junior doctor
on the emergency ward in the small coastal town of Hudiksvall in Sweden.
All the senior staff were down in the dining hall and as the assistant nurse and
I searched frantically for the folder of disaster instructions, I could already
hear the helicopter landing. The two of us were going to have to handle this
on our own.
Seconds later a stretcher was rolled in, bearing a man in dark green overalls
and a camouflage life jacket. His arms and legs were twitching. An epileptic
seizure, I thought; off with his clothes. I removed his life jacket easily but his
overalls were more problematic. They looked like a spacesuit, with huge
sturdy zippers all over, and no matter how hard I tried I couldn’t find the
zipper that undid them. I had just registered that the uniform meant this was a
military pilot when I noticed the blood all over the floor. “He’s bleeding,” I
shouted. With this much blood, I knew he could be dead in a matter of
seconds, but with the overalls still on, I couldn’t see where it was coming
from. I grabbed a big pair of plaster pliers to cut through the fabric and
howled to the assistant nurse, “Four bags of blood, O-negative. Now!”
To the patient, I shouted, “Where does it hurt?” “Yazhe shisha … na
adjezhizha zha …” he replied. I couldn’t understand a word, but it sounded
like Russian. I looked the man in his eyes and said with a clear voice, “все
тихо товарищ, шведскaya больницa,” which means “All is calm, comrade,
Swedish hospital.”
I will never forget the look of panic I triggered with those words.
Frightened out of his mind, he stared back at me and tried to tell me
something: “Vavdvfor papratarjenji rysskamememje ej …” I looked into his
eyes full of fear, and then I realized: this must be a Russian fighter pilot who
has been shot down over Swedish territory. Which means that the Soviet
Union is attacking us. World War III has started! I was paralyzed by fear.
Fortunately, at that moment the head nurse, Birgitta, came back from lunch.
She snatched the plaster pliers from my hand and hissed, “Don’t shred it.
That’s an air force ‘G suit’ and it costs more than 10,000 Swedish kronor.”
After a beat she added, “And can you please step off the life jacket. You’re
standing on the color cartridge and it is making the whole floor red.”
Birgitta turned to the patient, calmly freed him from his G suit, and
wrapped him in a couple of blankets. In the meantime she told him in
Swedish, “You were in the icy water for 23 minutes, which is why you are
jerking and shivering, and why we can’t understand what you’re saying.” The
Swedish air force pilot, who had evidently crashed during a routine flight,
gave me a comforting little smile.
A few years ago I contacted the pilot, and was relieved to hear that he
doesn’t remember a thing from those first minutes in the emergency room in
1975. But for me the experience is hard to forget. I will forever remember my
complete misjudgment. Everything was the other way around: the Russian
was Swedish, the war was peace, the epileptic seizure was cooling, and the
blood was a color ampule from inside the life jacket. Yet it had all seemed so
convincing to me.
When we are afraid, we do not see clearly. I was a young doctor facing my
first emergency, and I had always been terrified by the prospect of a third
world war. As a child, I often had nightmares about it. I would wake up and
run to my parents’ bed. I could be calmed only by my father going over the
details of our plan one more time: we would take our tent in the bike trailer
and go live in the woods where there were plenty of blueberries.
Inexperienced, and in an emergency situation for the first time, my head
quickly generated a worst-case scenario. I didn’t see what I wanted to see. I
saw what I was afraid of seeing. Critical thinking is always difficult, but it’s
almost impossible when we are scared. There’s no room for facts when our
minds are occupied by fear.
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