“It's not just that I don't like prom. I also don't like people who like prom," I explained, although, this was, in point of fact untrue. (book is Paper Towns)”
“Factfulness, like a healthy diet and regular exercise, can and should become part of your daily life. Start to practice it, and you will be able to replace your overdramatic worldview with a worldview based on facts.”
Source: Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think
“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.”
Source: Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think
“The huge reduction of deaths from natural disasters is yet another trend to add to the pile of mankind's ignored, unknown success stories.”
Source: Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think
“The numbers will never tell the full story of what life on Earth is all about.”
Source: Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think
“People will be asking how did we get here or why we are always lost generation ? It is because people perceptions and assumptions override facts these days.”
“If you believed in Christianity or Islam it was called 'faith', but if you believed in astrology or friday the thirteenth it was Superstition!”
Source: Sophie’s World
“The totalitarian regimes of the 20th century give us the starkest examples of such insanity. Stalin persecuted genetics researchers in the 1930s and ostentatiously praised the scientist Trofim Lysenko when he claimed that genetics was a “bourgeois perversion” and geneticists were “saboteurs”. The resulting crop failures killed millions. For an encore, Stalin ordered the killing of the statistician in charge of the 1937 census, Olimpiy Kvitkin. Kvitkin’s crime was that his census revealed a fall in population as a result of that famine. Telling that truth could not be forgiven.
In May, the great crop scientist Yuan Longping died at the age of 90. He led the research effort to develop the hybrid rice crops that now feed billions of people. Yet in 1966, he too came very close to being killed as a counter-revolutionary during China’s cultural revolution.
In western democracies we do things differently. Governments do not execute scientists; they sideline them. Late last year, Undark magazine interviewed eight former US government scientists who had left their posts in frustration or protest at the obstacles placed in their way under the presidency of Donald Trump.
Then there are the random acts of hostility on the street and the death threats on social media. I have seen Twitter posts demanding that certain statisticians be silenced or hunted down and destroyed, sometimes for doing no more than publishing graphs of Covid-19 cases and hospitalisations. Even when this remains at the level of ugly intimidation, it is horrible to hear about and must be far worse to experience. It is not something we should expect a civil servant, a vaccine researcher or a journalist to have to endure. And it would be complacent to believe that the threats are always empty.”
“One of the fundamental findings of cognitive science is that people think in terms of frames and metaphors […] The frames are in the synapses of our brains, physically present in the form of neural circuitry. When the facts don’t fit the frames, the frames are kept and the facts ignored.”
Source: Don't Think of an Elephant! Know Your Values and Frame the Debate: The Essential Guide for Progressives
“Ignoring the facts for short-term gain will almost always bring long-term pain.”
Source: Achieving your best day yet!: A more fulfilling career... a more impactful life