This
book is all about bringing up every day topics and situations that might be misunderstood
by the general public. The author usually starts by introducing each topic on
how most us of view the situation. It allows him to expose the truth easier
when he breaks down why we might have thought that way in the first place. When
he displays some of the numbers to prove his point, it makes you wonder how
many things you misunderstood by just agreeing with the stereotypes. He shares
a lot of points that makes it simpler to understand and tries to not go above
and beyond to sound right. I really enjoyed reading this because it makes you
reflect on your own thought process and how there’s a lot that we are
misinformed about, which makes us ignorant to the truth. The book tries to shine
light onto the world that everyone views as a dark place.
One
topic discussed in the book is fear. Everyone has their own fears, some weigh more
heavily on us than others and it varies in each person for different reasons. The
amount of exposure we have to certain fears will effect how we will react to
them. If all we hear are bad things towards a certain thing, when we are face
to face to this fear, we will think about all the negative exposures we’ve
heard about. We chose to filter the information we’ve heard to rank the
negative comments higher than the less negative ones, which makes us fear
things more. It can work in the opposite way too, we can only pay attention to
what makes something amazing but ignore the downside that can harm us. For
example, we are afraid of snakes because we hear about how dangerous they can
be. If we are not used to seeing snakes, when we do come close to one, we
automatically think they will attack and hurt us. In reality, they are harmful
animals but they are not out hunting everything in its path, so for the most
part they will not attack unless we give them a reason to. Fear is all about
your experience and exposure to what you are afraid of.
I
really enjoyed the chapter that discussed generalization and how we have to dissect
it. Sometimes we see a comparison that makes one side look much stronger than
the other because of what the person chose to compare. We have to ask ourselves
if it’s a fair comparison, if the points are accurate, and find out the truths
behind the generalization that was given. Saying “a majority” can mean just
about 50% or 90%, so saying “the majority” will not tell the whole story unless
you find out the truth behind it. I compare this to the LeBron vs Jordan
comparison. Younger kids will argue for LeBron because that’s the best player
they watched in their time. They will dismiss Jordan because they believe the
competition and expectations were lower back when he was playing, which isn’t completely
true. To someone who doesn’t know anything on the topic, they might agree with
their argument just because it sounds like a fair point. We have to see both
the similarities and differences and see if it’s even a relevant generalization/
comparison to make. We can pick a choose what is most important which can be
very misleading to people who are misinformed.
One of my favorite things the author brought
up was talking on blaming people. When something goes wrong, we need to have
someone or something to blame as an excuse to failure. It’s a natural thing all
of us do. Its most common in the workplace, politics and sports, when something
fails it’s usually the ones in charge that will take all the heat. Sometimes we
fail to realize that we use these people as scapegoats because we think there
has to be one individual that made everything go wrong, when in reality there
were other people and factors involved. We fail to understand that it could
have been anyone that was placed in the same situation but made different
choices that would result in the same outcome. This goes for failures and wins.
When we force the blame on one person or event, we forget about the tons of
factors that led up to that moment that could have led it to ended differently.
We have to understand that we all do it and have to look deeper into the why is
happened. There is always details that are left out because it’s easier to leave
the blame in one place. Before we use someone as a scapegoat, we should try to
understand everything that was in play and if there was anything that could
have been done to change how it went down.
Factfulness
is a great book that doesn’t have to be read from beginning to end. Each
chapter opens a new discussion that doesn’t necessarily require you to read the
previous chapters for you to understand. That’s something that’s nice about
this book, you can read it at your own leisure at any time and still get a lot
of information from what you’ve read. One thing that I wish was fixed a little
was how repetitive some of the chapters got. The author would explain a topic
and his argument on it, and would continuously bring up the same points over and
over. There was definitely parts of the book that could have been cut because
they were already stated or it wasn’t too important to add to make the point
understood. That is just my opinion and it doesn’t effect how good of a book it
is because there is a lot of good intel to take away after reading it. Overall I
would recommend reading the book to just test yourself on how much you might
think you know about yourself and the world.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment