

Hans Rosling: Do you know more about the world than a chimpanzee? - mxfh
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-24836917

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arjie
I'm having trouble understanding why so many here cannot grasp the use of the
rhetorical device. It's used to say: The world is not how you think it is. You
are likely so misinformed that picking randomly on this test will give you
better results than relying on your knowledge.

Are people seriously considering the idea that he thinks Swedish professors,
his colleagues, are not as smart as chimpanzees? He has previously said this.

I think this is a classical example of pg's middle-brow dismissal. What is the
real point here that's painfully obvious to most people I know? Our notions of
how the world is are wrong, and often they are very wrong (we seriously
underestimate life expectancy and literacy, and overestimate alternative
power).

Amusingly, I've never seen such a deluge of comments like this about the
Swedish professors. Too often people are so preoccupied with defending 'their
people' that they miss the point. It reminds me of reddit threads on
marijuana. It isn't that the British are dumb, it's that we all have these
misconceptions.

~~~
benjamincburns
But it's _so_ much easier to get insulted than to reflect on ourselves...

------
nagrom
The article is light on conclusions and full of fluff.

This has nothing to do with chimps. A chimp is used as an example of an agent
selecting at random...as a rhetorical device it obscures the author's point
and simply confuses the reader. A proper headline would be "British people
seem to be more pessimistic than is justified."

The point that the professor seems to be making is that many of the
preconceptions that British people have about the world are pessimistic.
That's a fair point, but there's no discussion as to why or what it means - is
it a national tendency, is it to do with the images in the media, what are the
implications for the economy or the political situation, is it even a bad
thing to be slightly pessimistic? What opportunities does the national
pessimism create and what opportunities does it destroy?

Aside from a few interesting 'gotcha' questions in the quiz, there's not very
much to this article at all.

~~~
mxfh
It's meant to be a teaser for tonight's BBC TWO show

"Don't Panic — The Truth About Population"

[http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/proginfo/2013/45/this-
world...](http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/proginfo/2013/45/this-world-hans-
rosling.html)

This video excerpt makes it looks like it's going to challenge Al Gore's "An
Inconvenient Truth" in all fields of over-the-top presentation exaggeration
techniques — including the use of ladders:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QpdyCJi3Ib4](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QpdyCJi3Ib4)

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dirtyaura
A great talk by Hans Rosling that discusses many of these questions. Worth of
watching for entrepreneurs, it's a kind of reality check on where we are and
where we are going from a demographic perspective:

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLzqJF5GhnQ&feature=youtu.be](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLzqJF5GhnQ&feature=youtu.be)

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jnbiche
I've liked Rosling's talks before, but this is annoying. No, most of the
respondents did not pick at random. In all the questions except one or two,
the majority chose the response with the closest value to the correct
response. And it was usually within a reasonable margin (60% vs 80% literacy).

So I think we may be able to extrapolate that most Brits have a slightly more
pessimistic view of the world that what the facts show us (depends on how many
people they surveyed and other factors), but not that they're somehow dumber
than chimpanzees.

~~~
benjamincburns
Having watched his talks as well, and having dealt with news media, I'm hoping
that there's a bit of a lens being applied by the author. In my head as I was
reading this, I paraphrased the main point of this to read that there was a
pessimistic bias amongst British respondents which caused most of them to
answer fewer than 25% of questions correctly (the most likely score to achieve
by random choice).

His message is astoundingly positive. Admittedly he does like to poke at the
western world a bit, but I doubt he was throwing as strong of a jab at Great
Britain as the author would like you to believe.

Edit: Nevermind. I just read it again. The chimpanzee comparison is really
obnoxiously contrived. We don't know what the full conversation was, but it
certainly looks like the author is pulling the conversation back toward
sanity. Regarding Brits answering worse than randomly, the author says:

    
    
        To be fair, so did the Swedes, the only other nation to have
        been polled so far. In a speech to TED downloaded almost six
        million times, he points out that he also put the questions
        to some fellow professors, and they were on a par with
        chimpanzees, too.
    

I still like the overall message, however. As a whole the world is in a golden
age of prosperity right now. Yes, there are awful, horrible atrocities
happening on a daily basis, but on a global scale the quality of life of the
average person is improving year over year at a very fast pace.

~~~
rs232
If Rosling read this he would chide you for using the term "Western World"
just like that, with at best an assumed definition. It is one of his pet
peeves to stress that the world is no longer divided into the Developing world
and The West.

~~~
sp332
He mentioned that the huge economic gulf has turned into a gentle slope, but
there's certainly still a _cultural_ definition of "the west".

~~~
benjamincburns
Yes, I was absolutely referring to the cultural West (which I'd guess is the
population in which he and the rest of the GapMinder project will continue to
find this bias) rather than the socioeconomic West.

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forktheif
Woo! 8/9, only got the number of children question wrong.

The story's a pretty good example of how badly mislead most people are by the
media. There are so many extremely important issues where the majority of
people have completely the wrong impression. It's not just world development,
it's nearly all issues.

------
Houshalter
The survey illustrates a great point about how many conceptions the public has
about the worlds are totally wrong. I don't want to detract from that, but I
have a minor criticism about the whole "worse than chimpanzees" thing. I think
they picked these questions knowing or at least having an idea that the
majority of people would get them wrong. It's not hard to design a survey that
gives you whatever results you want if you can pick any questions at all.
Manipulating the multiple choices (contrasting the good answer with opposite
extremes for example) might also have an effect.

The projection of children by 2100 doesn't seem accurate. Yes population
growth is declining but after 3 to 4 generations of exponential growth,
wouldn't populations with a high cultural or biological tendency to reproduce
more be vastly over-represented by then?

~~~
bzbarsky
Birth rates are dropping in pretty every high-birth-rate population, even ones
with very strong cultural/religious tendencies to reproduce (e.g.
[http://forward.com/articles/139391/in-israel-haredi-and-
musl...](http://forward.com/articles/139391/in-israel-haredi-and-muslim-women-
are-having-fewer/) is a good example that surprised me).

I'd be interested in what populations you think have high birth rates, will
continue to do so, and how big those populations are...

~~~
Houshalter
I don't know what specific populations have higher birth rates, but any
individuals with a greater tendency to reproduce are going to be selected for
heavily and pass along their cultural tendencies as well.

------
cdoxsey
His take on population seems to positive to me. The world's drastically
declining birth rates is going to be a huge problem in the next 100 years.
[http://amzn.com/B00ATL9ZK6](http://amzn.com/B00ATL9ZK6)

~~~
novalis78
If you want to "preview" what that will mean in real-life: move to Europe and
enjoy watching!

~~~
nobodysfool
It's simple, really. If your economy depends on 'growth' to sustain itself,
it's not going to happen, or it's going to be from the growth of immigration.
As you see in Italy, they are becoming quite racist as africans and muslims
immigrate.

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Bsharp
The only reason people did worse is because either the questions are worded
somewhat deceptively (question 1 presents itself like a math problem where 4bn
would be correct) or they challenge something no none would know and would
have to make a guess based on their current worldview, such as poverty overall
decreasing in recent years, which contrasts the cries of many politicians and
talking heads. Chimpanzees don't "know" any more, but they're not going to
fall for the traps in questions designed to trip people up. This is basically
a test of common misconceptions.

~~~
pavlov
_... they challenge something no one would know and would have to make a guess
based on their current worldview._

That's the whole point of this article. Why do these facts fall under the
heading "something no one would know"? Why are people so poorly informed about
the direction and magnitude of large-scale changes in the world's societies
and economies?

Naturally this has nothing to do with chimps, that was just rhetorics towards
a clickable headline.

~~~
Bsharp
I agree that the title is linkbait, which is unfortunate since the content is
interesting enough to not need it.

Why are those things people should care about? I understand that knowing these
things means you have a less-skewed view of the world, but I don't think it's
unreasonable that Average Joe doesn't know the world life expectancy or the
population distribution. To most people these metrics are just interesting
curiosities and nothing more - they have other things to care about, so
naturally something like this falls by the wayside. I feel like the article is
unfairly criticizing people for not being informed.

I think it would be more interesting if someone gave this to 1,000 leading
politicians, who should be much more knowledgeable about this stuff but I
suspect would only do somewhat better, if at all. (Disclaimer: making that
up.)

~~~
vidarh
The problem is not so much when people don't know, but that people often _do_
pick up misinformation, and let that influence choices such as who they vote
for, and what views they hold, rather than admit they don't know and go look
something up.

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ldng
I'm a huge fan of Rosling. Obligatory link to Gapminder

[http://www.gapminder.org/](http://www.gapminder.org/)

Video section is full of gems.

~~~
draugadrotten
_He started measuring the ignorance among students and professors and the
surprising results from the so called “Chimpanzee Test” were presented in his
first TED-talk in 2006.

In the test question Hans combined 5 pairs of countries. Each pair had one
Asian country and one European country. He asked the students to pick the
country in each pair which had twice the child mortality of the other country.
If the country names had been written on 5 pairs of bananas, on average the
chimpanzee would score 2.5 correct answers. To Hans’s great surprise his
Global Health Students performed worse than the chimps, i.e. worse than
random. _
[http://www.gapminder.org/ignorance/](http://www.gapminder.org/ignorance/)

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nexneo
I was wrong on questions 3, 5 and 6, happy surprise!

