Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think

Factfulness

---

Factfulness is … recognizing when a decision feels urgent
and
remembering that it rarely is.
To control the urgency instinct, 
take small steps.
•
Take a breath.
When your urgency instinct is triggered, your other
instincts kick in and your analysis shuts down. Ask for more time and
more information. It’s rarely now or never and it’s rarely either/or.
•
Insist on the data.
If something is urgent and important, it should be
measured. Beware of data that is relevant but inaccurate, or accurate
but irrelevant. Only relevant and accurate data is useful.
•
Beware of fortune-tellers.
Any prediction about the future is
uncertain. Be wary of predictions that fail to acknowledge that. Insist
on a full range of scenarios, never just the best or worst case. Ask how
often such predictions have been right before.
•
Be wary of drastic action.
Ask what the side effects will be. Ask how
the idea has been tested. Step-by-step practical improvements, and
evaluation of their impact, are less dramatic but usually more
effective.
OceanofPDF.com

---

CHAPTER ELEVEN
FACTFULNESS IN PRACTICE
How Factfulness Saved My Life
“I think we should run,” whispered the young teacher standing beside me.
Two thoughts raced across my mind. One was that if the teacher took off, I
would have no way of communicating with the agitated crowd in front of me.
I grabbed his arm and held on tightly.
The other thought was something that a wise governor of Tanzania had told
me: “When someone threatens you with a machete, never turn your back.
Stand still. Look him straight in the eye and ask him what the problem is.”
It was 1989 and I was in a remote and extremely poor village named
Makanga in the Bandundu region of what was then Zaire and is now the
Democratic Republic of Congo. I was part of a team investigating an
epidemic of the incurable paralytic disease called konzo that I had first
discovered in Mozambique years earlier.
The research project had been two years in the planning and everything—
all the approvals, drivers, translators, and lab equipment—had been
meticulously prepared. But I had made one serious mistake. I had not
explained properly to the villagers what I wanted to do and why. I wanted to
interview all the villagers and take samples of their food, and their blood and
urine, and I should have been with the head of the village when he explained
that to them.
That morning, as I had been quietly and methodically setting up in the hut,
I heard villagers starting to gather outside. They somehow seemed uneasy but
I was occupied with getting the blood sample machine to work. Eventually I
managed to start the diesel generator and do a test run with the centrifuge.
The machines were noisy and it was only when I switched them off that I
heard the raised voices. Things had changed in seconds. I bent forward and
stepped out of the low door. It had been dark in the hut and when I
straightened up at first I couldn’t see a thing. Then I saw: a crowd of maybe

---

50 people, all upset and angry. Some of them were pointing their fingers at
me. Two men raised muscled arms and waved big machete knives.
That was when the teacher, my translator, suggested we run. I looked right
and left and saw nowhere to go. If the villagers really wanted to hurt me there
were enough of them to hold me back and let the machete men cut me down.
“What’s the problem?” I asked the teacher.
“They are saying that you are selling the blood. You are cheating us. You
are giving money only to the chief, and then you are going to make something
with the blood that will hurt us. They say you shouldn’t steal their blood.”
This was very bad. I asked him if he would translate for me and then I
turned to the crowd. “Can I explain?” I asked the villagers. “I can either leave
your village right away, if you want, or I can explain why we have come.”
“Tell us first,” the people said. (Life is boring in these remote villages, so
they probably thought, We can let him talk first, and we can kill him
afterward.) The crowd held back the men with the machetes: “Let him talk.”
This was the talk we should have had before. If you want to go into a
village to do research, you have to take small steps, take your time, and be
respectful. You have to let people ask all their questions, and you have to
answer them.
I started to explain that we were working on a disease named konzo. I had
photos from Mozambique and Tanzania, where I had studied konzo before,
which I showed them. They were very interested in the photos. “We think it’s
linked to how you prepare the cassava,” I said.
“No, no, no,” they said.
“Well, we want to do this research, to test whether we are right. If we can
find out, maybe you won’t get the disease anymore.”
Many of the children in the village had konzo. We had noticed them when
we first arrived, lagging behind while the other children ran alongside our
jeep with charming curiosity. I had spotted some children in this crowd with
the classic spastic walking style too.
People began to mumble. One of the machete men, the more dangerous-
looking one, with bloodshot eyes and a big scar down his forearm, started
screaming again.
And then a barefoot woman, perhaps 50 years old, stepped out of the
crowd. She strode toward me and then turned, threw out her arms, and in a
loud voice said, “Can’t you hear that it makes sense, what he is saying? Shut
up! It makes sense. This blood test is necessary. Don’t you remember
everyone who died from measles? So many of our children died. Then they
came and gave the children the vaccine, remember, and now no child ever
dies of that disease. OK?”

---

The crowd shouted back, unmollified. “Yes, measles vaccine was good. But
now they want to come take our blood, blah, blah, blah.”
The woman paused, then took a step toward the crowd. “How do you think
they discovered the measles vaccine? Do you think it grows on trees in their
countries? Do you think they pulled it out of the ground? No, they do what
this doctor calls”—and she looked at me—“RE-SEAR-CHE.” As she
repeated the word the translator had used for research, she turned round and
pointed at me. “That is how they find out how to cure diseases. Don’t you
see?”
We were in the most remote part of Bandundu, and here this woman had
stepped up like the secretary of the Academy of Science and defended
scientific research.
“I have a grandchild crippled for life by this 
konzo.
The doctor says he
can’t cure it. But if we let him study us, perhaps he will find a way to stop it,
like they stopped measles, so that we don’t have to see our children and our
grandchildren crippled anymore. This makes sense to me. We, the people of
Makanga, need this ‘research.’” Her dramatic talent was amazing. But she
didn’t use it to distort the facts. She used it to explain them. Forcefully, in a
manner I had seen confident African women act in villages many times
before, she rolled up her left sleeve. She turned her back on the crowd,
pointed with her other hand to the crook of her arm, and looked me in the
eyes. “Here. Doctor. Take my blood.”
The men with machetes lowered their arms and moved away. Five or six
others wandered off, grumbling. Everyone else lined up behind the woman to
give their blood, the shouting replaced by soft voices and faces turned from
anger to curious smiles.
I have always been extremely thankful for this courageous woman’s
insight. And now that we have defined Factfulness after years of fighting
ignorance, I am amazed at how well it describes her behavior. She seemed to
recognize all the dramatic instincts that had been triggered in that mob, helped
them gain control over them, and convinced her fellow villagers with rational
arguments. The fear instinct had been triggered by the sharp needles, the
blood, and the disease. The generalization instinct had put me in a box as a
plundering European. The blame instinct made the villagers take a stand
against the evil doctor who had come to steal their blood. The urgency
instinct made people make up their minds way too fast.
Still, under this pressure, she had stood up and spoken out. It had nothing to
do with formal education. She most certainly had never left Bandundu and
I’m sure she was illiterate. Without a doubt she had never learned statistics or
spent time memorizing facts about the world. But she had courage. And she

---

was able to think critically and express herself with razor-sharp logic and
perfect rhetoric at a moment of extreme tension. Her factfulness saved my
life. And if that woman could be factful under those circumstances, then you,
highly educated, literate reader who just read this book, you can do it too.