Straight Line or Not?
Until this spring, I had never heard of the book Factfulness. Then Bill Gates made a big splash in the news by giving each U.S. graduate from college a copy. In reading the book, I found it to be a remarkable combination of hopefulness and commentary about some of our blindspots regarding numeracy, and how we interpret and internalize information in a media-saturated world. If you have not read the book, I recommend it highly—not only for how it can help us think about the world in a more informed and balanced way, but also how it analyzes classic mistakes that we are all prone to. The book describes our instincts to erroneously divide things into groups when distributions are more accurate (the gap instinct), misallocate attention to fear-triggering but low probability events (the fear instinct), plus eight more. But beyond that, Factfulness also presents helpful strategies to tame these debilitating instincts and prevent them from leading us toward false conclusions and perceptions. In this column, I would like to focus on one of these 10 instincts: the straight line instinct, which suggests that we often are tempted to extrapolate patterns with straight lines, when these may not be appropriate. Factfulness gives several examples in which incongruous results are obtained, including one that projects the growth rate of newborns unaltered through adulthood and reaches outlandish heights.
- Research Organization:
- Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), Los Alamos, NM (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE
- Grant/Contract Number:
- 89233218CNA000001
- OSTI ID:
- 1511252
- Report Number(s):
- LA-UR-18-31110
- Journal Information:
- Quality Progress, Vol. 51, Issue 10; ISSN 0033-524X
- Publisher:
- American Society for Quality ControlCopyright Statement
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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