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Don't throw around accusations like that willy nilly. It causes "propaganda" to become a trivialized term that everyone can just throw at anyone making any stat

by brabel 3y ago

Don't throw around accusations like that willy nilly. It causes "propaganda" to become a trivialized term that everyone can just throw at anyone making any statement they don't agree with after 1 minute of consideration. This book was written by Hans Rosling, a man who was an expert in data analysis and whose mission was to show actual world data to people in fantastic visualizations they could clearly understand. If there's anything that's far removed from propaganda, it's Rosling's data-based approach to what the situation of the world really is. About house affordability: do you have statistics for that for every country in the world, or you only care about your neck of the woods (which is not what Rosling cared about at all)? But even if that's true, it doesn't contradict the fact that almost every metric, if not every single one, is better today, please don't succumb to the strawman fallacy. I will leave his quote here, from his Wikipedia entry: "People often call me an optimist, because I show them the enormous progress they didn't know about. That makes me angry. I'm not an optimist. That makes me sound naive. I'm a very serious "possibilist". That's something I made up. It means someone who neither hopes without reason, nor fears without reason, someone who constantly resists the overdramatic worldview. As a possibilist, I see all this progress, and it fills me with conviction and hope that further progress is possible. This is not optimistic. It is having a clear and reasonable idea about how things are. It is having a worldview that is constructive and useful."

Retric 3y ago
Propaganda is about showing just the right data in the right way to make an argument. As such his backstory is perfect for a propaganda piece. > almost every metric That’s exactly the kind of thing that’s both misleading and false. Take global divorce rate, it’s one metric but you can easily turn it into several others if you’re trying to support a given narrative. Average length of marriage, percentage of the global population married, etc. You can even swap positive metrics for negative ones or do the reverse. Average lifespan after cancer diagnosis increasing is good but more people with cancer sounds bad. More treatment options is good, but spiraling cost of new treatments is bad
- jvanderbot 3y ago
  Don't get uppity about "almost every metric". It's quite possibly true, after all. But then again we're defining the metrics aren't we, with all our recency bias and modern philosophy on life. A high divorce rate is a positive thing if it means people are getting out of bad marriages and living poverty free independent lives. We have a lot of civil law around divorce that makes it expensive and painful, but not Henry 8th.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - brabel 3y ago
    The book includes metrics that are really important , like rate of child mortality, people below the poverty line... stuff that really, really impacts the world population. It's honestly bizarre to see people in this thread coming up with the most ridiculous metrics, like divorce rate, to "contradict" the general trend that the world is improving... it's seriously messed up to think those metrics are in some way similar.
- simonh 3y ago
  Sure you can accuse statisticians like this of picking and choosing metrics and you can choose other metrics to paint a different picture. That's really not the point the book is making though. What the book does is ask ordinary people what they think is happening on metrics do they care about, and are those metrics getting better or worse. So the metrics themselves are part of the story, but it's people's perception of them that's the main point. It turns out that people consistently get this wrong, and think that these things are getting worse when actually they are mostly getting much better. So this isn't so much about the author painting a picture of the world getting better, though maybe that's part of the argument. It's about ordinary people having an extremely distorted view of progress. Whatever you think about these metrics or other metrics, it's hard to argue that this central thesis of the book about people's view of these metrics is wrong.
  - Retric 3y ago
rgbgraph 3y ago
> do you have statistics for that for every country in the world, or you only care about your neck of the woods (which is not what Rosling cared about at all)? But even if that's true, it doesn't contradict the fact that almost every metric, if not every single one, is better today, please don't succumb to the strawman fallacy. The same could be said for Rosling. How much of his bias has crept into his analysis? Is he measuring the right things -- or simply what is en vogue (or worse, what is best for his interests). I would trust a basement-dwelling amateur analyst to find the "truth," much sooner than I would a pseudo-celebrity/influencer, going around holding TED talks.

by brabel 3y ago

Retric 3y ago

Propaganda is about showing just the right data in the right way to make an argument. As such his backstory is perfect for a propaganda piece. > almost every metric That’s exactly the kind of thing that’s both misleading and false. Take global divorce rate, it’s one metric but you can easily turn it into several others if you’re trying to support a given narrative. Average length of marriage, percentage of the global population married, etc. You can even swap positive metrics for negative ones or do the reverse. Average lifespan after cancer diagnosis increasing is good but more people with cancer sounds bad. More treatment options is good, but spiraling cost of new treatments is bad

jvanderbot 3y ago
Don't get uppity about "almost every metric". It's quite possibly true, after all. But then again we're defining the metrics aren't we, with all our recency bias and modern philosophy on life. A high divorce rate is a positive thing if it means people are getting out of bad marriages and living poverty free independent lives. We have a lot of civil law around divorce that makes it expensive and painful, but not Henry 8th.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- brabel 3y ago
  The book includes metrics that are really important , like rate of child mortality, people below the poverty line... stuff that really, really impacts the world population. It's honestly bizarre to see people in this thread coming up with the most ridiculous metrics, like divorce rate, to "contradict" the general trend that the world is improving... it's seriously messed up to think those metrics are in some way similar.
simonh 3y ago
Sure you can accuse statisticians like this of picking and choosing metrics and you can choose other metrics to paint a different picture. That's really not the point the book is making though. What the book does is ask ordinary people what they think is happening on metrics do they care about, and are those metrics getting better or worse. So the metrics themselves are part of the story, but it's people's perception of them that's the main point. It turns out that people consistently get this wrong, and think that these things are getting worse when actually they are mostly getting much better. So this isn't so much about the author painting a picture of the world getting better, though maybe that's part of the argument. It's about ordinary people having an extremely distorted view of progress. Whatever you think about these metrics or other metrics, it's hard to argue that this central thesis of the book about people's view of these metrics is wrong.
- Retric 3y ago

rgbgraph 3y ago

> do you have statistics for that for every country in the world, or you only care about your neck of the woods (which is not what Rosling cared about at all)? But even if that's true, it doesn't contradict the fact that almost every metric, if not every single one, is better today, please don't succumb to the strawman fallacy. The same could be said for Rosling. How much of his bias has crept into his analysis? Is he measuring the right things -- or simply what is en vogue (or worse, what is best for his interests). I would trust a basement-dwelling amateur analyst to find the "truth," much sooner than I would a pseudo-celebrity/influencer, going around holding TED talks.