This is your brain on social media/news

As Dr House is wont to say, "everybody lies".

But some do it with statistics.

It therefore behooves us to read the news (and any thing really) critically.

Or else we might just get swept along by some "influencer".

And it's not even necessarily some sweaty ranty conspiracy theorist. It might even be mainstream media.

A little bit of crystal ball gazing

What's going to happen next?

Well, Heng Swee Keat will be the next PM of Singapore.

And Tan Cheng Bock has announced that he is coming out of political retirement.

But that's all just the near future. And these are just small local details that will not change the BIG PICTURE.

Singapore and Switzerland - a comparison

[This post was first drafted in 2015. So the figures are a little outdated, but updating them may simply be redundant for the argument. At least I assume so. Feel free to prove me wrong.]

You may recall at one point our former PM Goh Chok Tong promised/claimed that Singapore will reach Swiss Standard of Living. I checked. He made the "prediction" in 1984 that we would reach Swiss 1984 Standard of living by 1999. We made in in 2000. Just off by a year.

But there are still... sceptics.

Who are able to provide anecdotal or cherry-picked data to make their point.

This is not a rebuttal of their point, or points. This is a presentation of... the wider picture.