Tag Archives: Rosling

Some Things Never Change: the Destiny Instinct

Posted on November 27, 2025 | 2 comments

When I was a kid in 1950’s Maryland, Thanksgiving was all about the Pilgrims and the friendly Indians in Massachusetts. Before sitting down to turkey and stuffing at Grandma’s house, I’d probably participated in an earlier school Thanksgiving pageant, its prize roles going to the Indian Squanto and to Massachusetts governor William Bradford. We made paper cutouts of Pilgrim hats, or paper headdresses of fake feathers. It was pretty much the same every year.

Much later, after I’d lived near Virginia’s coastal plains for decades, I went to watch a celebration of the Virginia version of the first Thanksgiving—held, locals bragged, before the Massachusetts pilgrims had even landed. At what later became Berkeley Plantation, according to its website (https://berkeleyplantation.com/first-thanksgiving), in late November, 1619, a newly arrived set of 50 additional Virginia settlers gave thanks, per instructions from their sponsors back in England: “We ordaine that this day of our ships arrival, at the place assigned for plantacon, in the land of Virginia, shall be yearly and perpetually kept holy as a day of Thanksgiving to Almighty God.” Little thought back then was given to the perspectives of the native peoples who were often being displaced, diseased, and/or disrespected by the growing numbers of European settlers coming to Virginia, Massachusetts, and other areas up and down the Eastern seaboard of North America. You have to read beyond the Thanksgiving chapter of the Berkeley website to learn that in 1622, local tribes rose up in a concerted attack against the British settlers, after which the Berkeley settlement disintegrated. The next Thanksgiving celebration at Berkeley was not until 1958.

I now live in California, where origin stories for Thanksgiving are multiple and murky. It’s possible that the earliest Spanish or Russian explorers had celebrations of thanksgiving after surviving especially difficult passages. Later specific dates for California’s initial celebrations are variously given as: December 10, 1774, when some of the Franciscan missionaries in the area celebrated a near-miraculous return to health of one of their brothers; or November 29, 1849 in and around the goldfields; or November 30, 1850, based on a proclamation by Governor Peter Burnett in Sacramento in the newly established State of California. The safest date to recognize may be the 1863 proclamation by Abraham Lincoln of the first national day of Thanksgiving on the last Thursday of November.

Wherever we live in the U.S., there seem to be a wealth of “first Thanksgivings” to choose from. Our views of what’s appropriate for Thanksgiving and “who got there first” will likely continue to change.

The book Factfulness was written by three Swedes, so there are no examples of Thanksgivings and the way the feast has changed. However, the authors use multiple examples to show that many things do change, if sometimes slowly. One example I especially like is Hans Rosling’s analysis of the compounding impact of slow changes for Earth’s nature preserves and natural parks. Under the rubric “Slow Change Is Not No Change,” he begins with an initial set-aside of natural land nearly 2500 years ago:

“In the third century BC, the world’s first nature reserve was created by King Devanampiya Tessa in Sri Lanka. … It took more than 2000 years for a European, in West Yorkshire, to get a similar idea, and another 50 years before Yellowstone National Park was established in the United States. By the year 1900, 0.03 percent of the Earth’s land surface as protected. …Slowly, slowly, decade by decade, one forest at a time, the numbers climbed. The annual increase was absolutely tiny, almost imperceptible. Today a stunning 15 percent of the Earth’s surface is protected, and the number is still climbing.” (One globally ambitions goal is to have 30% of the earth’s land and seas protected by 2030: https://www.campaignfornature.org/getting-to-30.)

Of course, change can be multi-directional. There’s no guarantee all change will be positive. But the notion that things cannot change can prevent much of the experimentation that might help improve things.

Among the prescriptions the Roslings suggest for countering the “destiny instinct” are exercises like the one I’ve tried to develop here about Thanksgiving—the way we now think about and celebrate Thanksgiving is not the same as when I was a child, nor need it be the way people will celebrate in the future. Per the Roslings, “Challenge the idea that today’s culture must also have been yesterday’s, and will also be tomorrow’s.”

In a long life so far, among the things that have not changed for me are gratitude for life. I’m also grateful for new and renewed possibilities for continued learning. Happy Thanksgiving to all!

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Posted in holidays, Quandaries and Rants, Uncategorized

Tagged Berkeley Plantation, Factfulness, first Thanksgiving, Massachusetts Bay Colony, native Americans, natural parks, nature preserves, Pilgrims, Rosling, slow change is not no change, Thanksgiving

The Elephants in the Room: The Size and Generalization Instincts

Posted on November 22, 2025 | 1 comment

To me, two of the middle instincts described in the book Factfulness seem closely related: the “size instinct” and the “generalization instinct.” Both can cause us to misjudge the importance of a given factor in a situation.

Hans Rosling describes the size instinct with the following anecdote: early in his career, he spent time as a primary care doctor at the only hospital in a mostly rural, poor area of an African country. A pediatrician friend from Sweden had come for a short visit. After observing Rosling’s behavior during the previous night’s hospital shifts, he took Rosling to task for providing basic care, but not using heroic, complex measures to save a child who’d been admitted to the hospital, suffering from diarrhea and malnutrition. Rosling countered—right now he was the only medical professional in the area with skills to do the procedure needed to save that one child, which would also have required expensive equipment. Over time, he could save many more children by training other medical professionals to provide basic rural health care and by improving the equipment available to them. That way, far fewer children would have to be admitted to the hospital needing complex, heroic measures. Concentrating on that one critically ill child distorted its importance and actually reduced the chances of making a substantial difference in the area’s rates of child mortality.

Per the book’s authors, the somewhat related generalization instinct is often needed to help us live our everyday lives and to make decisions. The problem comes when we overgeneralize—Roslings’ favorite target is the overgeneralization of “developed” and “developing” countries. According to them, “The challenge is to realize which of our categories are misleading … and replace them with better categories.”

To me, our tendencies both to over-categorize and/or to over-stress an isolated case show up in a persistent quandary in journalistic ethics (yes—there is such a thing). Journalists in all media learn fairly early that most people are drawn to stories. In contrast, most of us tend to find statistics boring and overly dry. So, “if it bleeds, it ledes”—journalistic shorthand for telling a compelling story. Ideally, any story chosen should typify the larger pattern it is being used to represent.

For nearly all of us, what we experience directly carries more weight than what we experience at second or third hand. Therefore, journalists, politicians, and others who want to capture our attention try to draw analogies between what we know directly and the positions they are trying to get us to support.

One story, of the shyster “welfare queen,” was instrumental during the 1990’s in helping push through welfare reforms that limited eligibility and instituted additional work requirements for those receiving government assistance. Since nearly all of us know someone who at one time or another has “gamed the system” to obtain an otherwise undeserved benefit, we could relate.

A different story that got extended currency in the run-up to passage of the Affordable Care Act was the story of Barack Obama’s terminally ill mother having to deal with health insurance procedures while her own health was severely compromised. It was a compelling story that any of us who’ve ever lost a loved one to cancer or some other horrible disease can also relate to.

Were either of these stories representative of the larger issues they tried to address? Perhaps not. In order to determine the size or the generality of each story, we’d have had to wade through studies and statistics of the incidence and prevalence of welfare cheats or of terminally ill patients and their families dealing with health insurance claims. Sometimes such studies exist. At other times they either do not exist or are difficult to access.

To counter our size and generalization instincts, therefore, we usually need access to reliable data. We also need to vary our media sources to get differing perspectives. We need to seek out and discuss viewpoints with those whose life experiences are different from our own. From the Roslings’ perspective, it can help to travel widely, actually living for extended periods in a culture different from our “home” culture. We need to test our assumptions, especially about presumed uniformity among people we expect to be different from us but similar to each other.

We need stories, and we need statistics. Otherwise, our mental rooms tend to stay filled with sometimes comforting but ultimately damaging elephants.

1 Comment

Posted in Quandaries and Rants, Uncategorized

Tagged ACA, Factfulness, generalization, health insurance, living abroad, patterns, Rosling, size instinct, welfare queen, welfare reform

The “Fear” Instinct: Danger versus Fright

Posted on November 11, 2025 | Leave a comment

One of the most insidious “instincts” we retain from earlier periods of human existence is the fear instinct, when misapplied. Some fears are justified. Many are not, or are blown out of proportion.

Like Hans Rosling, author of Factfulness, I grew up during the 1950’s and 1960’s Cold War era, back when we did “civil defense” drills for protecting ourselves in the event of a nuclear attack (spoiler alert—hiding under your elementary school desk with your hands interlaced above your head would be pretty useless against nuclear blasts or fallout).

My nightmares back then involved not being able to find family members in time for all of us to hide in our house’s basement, the one area that might provide some minimal protection against the effects of nuclear blasts and radiation. As our societies continue to learn to deal with nuclear threats, my fear level about nuclear attack ebbs and flows.

My fear of snakes has likewise ebbed and flowed. Much of my life has been spent where snake bites are rare and even more rarely lethal. However, during my one extended stay in an African country, where black or green mambas could inject a quickly lethal venom and sometimes were fairly well camouflaged, fear of snakes may have helped keep me alive.

Back then, I had part-time access to an aging Volkswagen beetle with a rust hole near its gas pedal. I used it to commute to the offices of an international development project I was a temporary part of. One afternoon, as I drove back to the office after a lunch break, I noticed a large black snake sidling across the road in front of me. Had it been still, I might not have registered its presence. As it was, I slammed on the brakes and pulled to the side of the road a good distance uphill from the snake. The little car I was driving might have been heavy enough to crush the snake, but I decided it would be risky to drive over it. The hole in the bottom of the car was too near my foot. Instead, I waited. Not long afterward, a heavy luxury vehicle driven by the head of the local branch of the World Bank came barreling down the hill. After the Mercedes drove over it, the snake was thoroughly crushed and dead. I proceeded, more careful thereafter to distinguish between road tar and road snakes.

Rosling tells a story of how, when he was just starting out as a physician, his irrational fear of nuclear war badly distorted his initial reaction to an incoherent Swedish pilot with hypothermia. Afterwards, Rosling’s longish life of dealing in some fearful situations led him to a more skeptical view of most fears: “Fears that once helped keep our ancestors alive, today help keep journalists employed.” Rosling asserts, “If we look at the facts behind the headlines, we can see how the fear instinct systematically distorts what we see of the world.”

Today is Veterans’ Day, when we honor those living and dead who have sometimes put themselves in harm’s way to help keep the rest of us safer. They get sent where most of us would fear to go. During the waning days of World War II, my Dad was stationed with the Navy in the South Pacific. He never made a fuss about being a veteran. The war he was part of did horrendous damage, but may have indirectly played a small part in reducing our fears of “others.” As some lyrics from the 1949 musical “South Pacific” taunted: “You’ve got to be taught to be afraid of people whose eyes are oddly made, and people whose skin is a different shade, you’ve got to be carefully taught…” Some of those of different shades who’d served during World War II eventually became leaders in the Civil Rights movements, including Medgar Evers and Ralph Abernathy.

Not having served in the military, I cannot speak directly to the level of fear generated by deployment in dangerous areas or by actual combat. I am deeply indebted to those whose willingness to take risks on my behalf has made my life safer. However, I suspect that military planners and leaders have sometimes put both soldiers and civilians in harm’s way unnecessarily.

Rosling concludes, “Fear can be useful, but only if it is directed at the right things. … ‘Frightening’ and ‘dangerous’ are two different things. Something frightening poses a perceived risk. Something dangerous poses a real risk. Paying too much attention to what is frightening rather than what is dangerous … creates a tragic drainage of energy in the wrong directions.” May we all, especially our military’s leaders, get better at distinguishing fright from danger.

Newsworthy?

Posted on March 15, 2025 | Leave a comment

The news seems to come at us faster and faster these days. With so many channels and so many media, it can be hard to keep track. Hard, too, to keep away from the insistent, worrisome chatter. Might our job/investment portfolio/health care/retirement income go up in smoke if we don’t pay close enough attention? Might the next global conflict be just around the corner? Might the U.S. devolve into its next civil war during the current congressional or presidential term? Will we ever get to civil peace again?

Most mental health advice suggests that limiting our news consumption helps maintain our sanity. When we pay too much attention, we can easily succumb to the belief that everything is out of control, that things are bad and getting worse.

It helps me to take a step back. Being older in this instance can also be an asset. Having endured prior booms, busts, and disasters helps me put things into perspective.

As a lifelong bookworm, I’ve also developed during the past couple of decades some “go to” volumes for perspective adjustment. Two stand out, both for their global range, and for their hopefulness:

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Half the Sky, by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn, was published in 2009. Its title derives from the Chinese folk proverb, “Women hold up half the sky.” The book focusses on women’s situations in the developing world and how we might achieve women’s development goals globally. Kristof and WuDunn explore some of the gaps and practices that continue to disenfranchise women and girls. The authors stress adequate health care, education, and entrepreneurship as avenues for progress, benefitting both women and men. They present vivid examples, while being realistic about roadblocks. One is our human tendency to focus on individual stories over the “big picture.” For example, in discussing maternal mortality ratios, they touch briefly on overall statistics. Global data on such rates, from 2005, ranged from 1 death per 100,000 live births in Ireland to 2,100 in Sierra Leone. The authors then write: “…[W]e hesitate to pile on the data, since even when numbers are persuasive, they are not galvanizing. …[S]tatistics have a dulling effect, while it is individual stories that move people to act.” (p. 99)

Factfulness, by Hans Rosling with Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Rönnlund, was published in 2018. The subtitle to the Roslings’ book is attitude adjusting all by itself: “Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think.” Hans Rosling died while the book was in progress and was succeeded in authorship by his son and daughter-in-law. Hans gained wide recognition as a global health researcher who made statistics both more approachable and more relevant. He pioneered representing global datasets with proportionately sized bubbles for different countries or regions. He also showed bubbles in motion for longer term trends. (You may want to watch his TED talk from 2006 on late 20th century human fertility, health, wealth, and change titled “The Best Stats You’ve Ever Seen,” or a 4-minute BBC presentation of “200 years of health and wealth in 200 countries.”)

In Factfulness, the Roslings sum up Hans’ life’s work by pointing out the harmful “instincts” that can skew our assessments of overall conditions. One that I find especially prevalent in current news is the “size instinct.” As they explain:

“You tend to get things out of proportion. I do not mean to sound rude. Getting things out of proportion, or misjudging the size of things, is something that we humans do naturally. It is instinctive to look at a lonely number and misjudge its importance. …

The media is this instinct’s friend. …

The size instinct directs our limited attention and resources toward those individual instances or identifiable victims, those concrete things right in front of our eyes.” (pp. 128-129)

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Much of our current media, it seems to me, suffers greatly from overuse of the “size instinct.” Though huge numbers can get bandied about without much context, much of our media highlights whichever isolated facts promote their respective political agendas. Our size instinct is not new, but can get amplified in our media-saturated lives.

Several decades ago, I was exposed to the slogan “Think globally, act locally.” The Kristof/WuDunn and Rosling books remind me to pay attention to widespread, longer term trends, while at the same time concentrating my energies and skills toward making the locale where I live a little bit more humane, a little bit more equitable. Facts are mutable over time. Women do hold up half the sky. And if enough of us make small improvements wherever we are, over time we’ll become worthy of better news.