6 ms·

Hans Rosling: Do you know more about the world than a chimpanzee?

49 points by mxfh 13y ago

nexneo 13y ago
I was wrong on questions 3, 5 and 6, happy surprise!
dirtyaura 13y ago
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
forktheif 13y ago
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.
Bsharp 13y ago
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 13y ago
  ... 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 13y ago
    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 13y ago
      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.
jnbiche 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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 13y ago
    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.
nagrom 13y ago
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.
- daliusd 13y ago
  While I agree with your critique about headline but "pessimistic" is wrong word as well. Question about wind and solar energy indicates that they are optimistic. People are simply wrong quite often. Here is "related" video about wisdom of crowd: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOucwX7Z1HU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOucwX7Z1HU I wonder if we could apply idea of "wisdom of crowd" to those quiz questions.
- mxfh 13y ago
  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-hans-rosling.html http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/proginfo/2013/45/this-world... 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
Houshalter 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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-muslim-women-are-having-fewer/ http://forward.com/articles/139391/in-israel-haredi-and-musl... 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 13y ago
    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 13y ago
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 13y ago
  If you want to "preview" what that will mean in real-life: move to Europe and enjoy watching!
  - nobodysfool 13y ago
    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.
ldng 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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/
arjie 13y ago
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 13y ago
  But it's so much easier to get insulted than to reflect on ourselves...

49 points by mxfh 13y ago

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

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

forktheif 13y ago

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.

Bsharp 13y ago

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 13y ago
... 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 13y ago
  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 13y ago
    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.

jnbiche 13y ago

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 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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.

nagrom 13y ago

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.

daliusd 13y ago
While I agree with your critique about headline but "pessimistic" is wrong word as well. Question about wind and solar energy indicates that they are optimistic. People are simply wrong quite often. Here is "related" video about wisdom of crowd: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOucwX7Z1HU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOucwX7Z1HU I wonder if we could apply idea of "wisdom of crowd" to those quiz questions.
mxfh 13y ago
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-hans-rosling.html http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/proginfo/2013/45/this-world... 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

Houshalter 13y ago

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 13y ago
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-muslim-women-are-having-fewer/ http://forward.com/articles/139391/in-israel-haredi-and-musl... 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 13y ago
  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 13y ago

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 13y ago
If you want to "preview" what that will mean in real-life: move to Europe and enjoy watching!
- nobodysfool 13y ago
  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.

ldng 13y ago

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 13y ago
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/

arjie 13y ago

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 13y ago
But it's so much easier to get insulted than to reflect on ourselves...