{"id":32448,"date":"2023-04-20T10:15:07","date_gmt":"2023-04-20T17:15:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/?p=32448"},"modified":"2023-04-20T10:15:07","modified_gmt":"2023-04-20T17:15:07","slug":"perspective-enlightens-facts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/perspective-enlightens-facts\/","title":{"rendered":"Perspective Enlightens Facts"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>Ask Questions Learn More<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>In the book Factfulness by Hans Rosling he passionately instructs his readers to consider new ways of thinking or certainly ways to avoid thinking. Rosling says &#8220;This book is my very last battle in my lifelong mission to fight devastating global ignorance. It is my last attempt to make an impact on the world: to change people&#8217;s way of thinking, calm their irrational fears, and redirect their energies into constructive actives.&#8221; (15) Rosling comes to this conclusion after a life of trying o provide facts and information to educate the ignorance out of people. After hitting brick walls he realized that it wasn&#8217;t simply sharing the knowledge but that the worldview people held the perspectives they had would construe the facts or make the facts unbelievable. He calls this an overdramatic world view. As humans we tend to use our worldview to tell the story regardless of the facts. We let what Rosling calls our &#8220;dramatic instincts&#8221; our hard wired instincts create our overdramatic worldview (14-15) Being open to learning and asking questions is an important part of discovering fats but we also have to acknowledge where our hardwired brains, our instincts, can sway us and where our worldview can lead us to bias.<\/p>\n<p><b>\u00a0Bias is the Enemy of Factfulness<\/b><\/p>\n<p>Rosling lays out the Overdramatic Instincts that we have as humans in the chapters of is book.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Negativity<\/li>\n<li>Straight Line<\/li>\n<li>Fear<\/li>\n<li>Size<\/li>\n<li>Generalization<\/li>\n<li>Destiny<\/li>\n<li>Single Perspective<\/li>\n<li>Blame<\/li>\n<li>Urgency<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Each of these instincts play a role in how we see the world and the bias that they bring to how we view facts and process truth and un truth. When we allow these instincts to blind us to the facts before us then we begin to to see the world in a more negative light than what is really there. Rosling argues that we should be teaching critical thinking and we should acknowledge that the world is constantly changing and our worldview will have to do the same. &#8220;Most important of all, we should be teaching our children humility and curiosity.&#8221; (249) This is how we can begin to shape our perspective and change our worldview.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Change of Perspective<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Factfulness is recognizing that a single perspective can limit your imagination, and remembering that is is better to look at problems from many angles to a get a more accurate understanding and find practical solutions.&#8221; (202) When we only see things from one angle we miss the complexity and often the truth of what we are seeing. This perspective shift has been made real for me in many ways through my travel to other places and from experiencing first hand the facts that are present in places other than my own. I recently took a trip to Thailand. We sent some time in the the city of Bangkok. The city was full of people, vehicles, buses, subways, buildings, and especially glamorous shopping malls. From the perspective of a tourist it is a city with wealth and abundance. Looking beyond the simple exterior you would find that there are deep pains and struggle. From the sex trafficking and poverty, to the basic infrastructure lacking clean drinkable water. Things can appear one way and yet there is always something a different perspective can show you. There are similar issues right here in the United States that we often fail to see. Now, Rosling is trying to show us that the world is actually not as doomed as our bias might convince us. This can also be seen with a change of perspective. The people of Thailand are full of joy and generosity as well. We found ourselves at a bus stop confused about how to get to where we needed to and people saw our confusion and began to ask how they could help, gathering around us about 5 people discussed in Thai how they could help us find the best route and then one of them in English gave us directions to our destination. They wanted to help a foreign stranger in the their city. There is good in the world and sometimes it takes experiencing it to change your perspective and open your mind to the facts that there is still kindness and hope in the midst of the overdramatic worldview that our bias forms in our minds.<\/p>\n<p>We can find this new perspective by being willing to think critically and challenge the bias we hold deep with in us and then to embrace curiosity as we explore more possibilities than what we might see on the surface, all with a humble learners heart willing to acknowledge when the facts we thought were real might really have changed and there is a new perspective revealing new facts in our ever changing world.<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling, and Anna Rosling R\u00f6nnlund, <em>Factfulness: Ten Reasons We\u2019re Wrong about the World\u2013and Why Things Are Better than You Think<\/em>, First edition (New York: Flatiron Books, 2018).<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Ask Questions Learn More In the book Factfulness by Hans Rosling he passionately instructs his readers to consider new ways of thinking or certainly ways to avoid thinking. Rosling says &#8220;This book is my very last battle in my lifelong mission to fight devastating global ignorance. It is my last attempt to make an impact [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":160,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2727],"class_list":["post-32448","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-rosling-dlgp01","cohort-dlgp01"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32448","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/160"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32448"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32448\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32450,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32448\/revisions\/32450"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32448"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32448"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32448"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}