Statistics, Fast and Slow
timharford.com
timharford.com
You might think photos would help, but the endless stream of images of "starving people" ends up being cumulative, compounding the matter.
Projects that systematically dig into the lived experience of beneficiaries and treat them as complex social beings start to bridge that gap. They not only dignify the people involved (providers and beneficiaries both), but also often discover systemic issues that "the numbers" would never reveal.
I wonder what conversations the author had with people who lived there (genuine question, not a criticism).
Hans Rosling has had lots of these conversations with people. They are detailed in the book as described.
It's a fantastic book BTW.
I think I've seen Mr Rosling's presentation on birthrates before, IIRC something to the effect of: Our "first world" assumption that might drive policy decisions is that "all the poor people" are having seemingly unlimited babies, when actually e.g. Bangladesh is at or almost below replacement. Global population will peak at ~10 billion in 2050 and then decline. Africa is still a variable. (These are from foggy memory, but match what I skimmed). It's compelling and hopeful work!
The projects I have in mind are monitoring & evaluation ones that some of our customers have done. (This gets a little deeper into methods, but still extends the conversation) E.g. as follow-up on World Food Program food distribution projects: A standard food security questionnaire asks something like, "when you're out of food, do you starve, borrow, or steal?" On paper that's all you get, those 3 dimensions. A different approach had an evaluator show video clips of local people talking (scripted) about doing those things. Beneficiaries are asked to pick which video best matches what they do. Then the evaluator interviews them about why they made their choice. It opens up dialog. The best example was the man who said, "Oh, I'm fine about food. But the video I picked showed that all tress are cut down in the background. We like your food, but it would be better if you would plant trees so we could go back to farming the way we know how." ...the recommendation and ensuing follow-up was a tree planting campaign!
So, to connect it back to the article, maybe, "Do all those people want to be riding buses, living in sky scrapers, ...?"
From a different angle, that brings to mind Seth Chase's excellent doc "We Will Win Peace" (https://www.kanopy.com/product/we-will-win-peace). Looks at the "popular" perception of conflict minerals economic issues in central Africa vs reality, ensuing US policies based on perceptions, and ensuing negative impact. (BTW If you ever need a filmographer, Seth is great!)
A pretty effective approach is something like ICIJ has done https://projects.icij.org/fatalextraction/ We're working on generating those efficiently from collected data, but you still need an author of sorts. Ultimately that's still in the slide deck realm, though.
A possibly less familiar solution is what's called Executive Briefing Centers that can get pretty Minority Report-like: a wall of screens with an interactive display (mouse/keyboard/script driven). Those presentations are curated and composed (think $100k slide decks or maybe a 1-off immersive video game) to get deep into understanding how a customer segment would experience a new product in a new store (is what I've seen).
Folks like IDEO have done some experiments with 3D cameras and VR. When I've tried it, I found the non-eye-contact disturbing ("And you can't smell the shit," as a friend put it). It's one thing to not speak the language. Quite another to not know what the ritual you're observing means to the participants (the VR scene I'm thinking of dropped you into a "sacred African dance around a fire").
An important distinction here is about reporting vs interacting. We say interaction is paramount. But it doesn't really scale--numbers do. That's kindof the point of the article: both have their place. The goal isn't to traumatize _more_ people, it's to communicate--effect a sharing of worlds--with the hope of breaking cycles of trauma and violence. Like some counseling techniques, maybe numeric abstraction provides a necessary distance from the immediacy of experience that allows us to get a handle on things and make change.
Insight Share and the participatory video folks are pushing the limits with current tech. There you get into enabling folks to solve their own problems, no need to convince donors.
There's an empowering irony in using iPhones or Occuli to interview tantalum/coltan/tin miners. But I bet if we asked them, they'd have some pretty sweet ideas for where/how to direct the talent and resources being used to develop the devices to help them...
Thanks for the question!
One of them I remember was where she had laid out some new purchases or something on her bed. What struck me, though, was that the walls of her room were corrugated iron. I wish I could have sent her £50 or something right then, without sounding like a patronising twat. Not a life changing sum, but maybe it would have helped her in some way.
"In the news people in other cultures seem stranger than they are. We visited 264 families in 50 countries and collected 30,000 photos. We sorted the homes by income, from left to right."
When I was in Switzerland I always thought there was something sluggish about the economy, the pace that things went at, the lunch breaks, but the stats say it's one of the most prosperous places in the world.
With the Scandies I wonder how on earth the happiest country in the world could possibly be Denmark. Maybe they hide their feelings, but I found a lot of other places have people who seem happier.
Getting those discrepancies is vital, btw. You need the impressions to make you curious about the stats, and vice versa.
Couple this with the engineering concept that as a system approaches 100% utilization, catastrophic failure becomes increasingly more likely, and people who are always busy may never be able to perform at their highest level. Once you fall behind, which is increasingly likely when trying to maximize short term output, it can be really hard to justify anything else. And if, god forbid, you start losing sleep, then you're going to be even more stupid, which will make any kind of catching up impossible.
Nobody cares for that, since there's nothing really critical behind most job positions -- just cogs in a bigger wheel.
In areas where this matters (e.g. people die), engineers are treated differently (e.g. at NASA).
Happines they measure is more accurately described as "life satisfaction". There is also large differences in how different cultures express happiness. In the Nordics there is cultural tendency to downplay positive emotions and not express them publicly.
Money and Happiness Rank of Income, Not Income, Affects Life Satisfaction http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0956797610362671
Finland Is the Happiest Country in the World, and Finns Aren't Happy about. https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/finland-is...
>If happiness is the prevalence of positive emotions (let alone the displaying of them), Finland is not the happiest country. If happiness is the absence of depression, Finland is not the happiest country. But if happiness is about a quiet satisfaction with one’s life conditions, then Finland, along with other Nordic countries, might very well be the best place to live.
As a Finn, I find that I'm happiest when I scowl in the rain.
Edit: these stats are often used to push a political agenda, citing "lack of growth for the middle class," but when you dig into the stats, the story is often the opposite of that claimed by the politician, etc.
A followup video argues that lower household income is due to smaller households, but fails to mention that individual income also trends down.[1]
Though your video appears neutral, it is presented by a libertarian and the key 23% statistic comes from a conservative economist. The argument that we shouldn't trust numbers is misleading when there is well-documented evidence across a range of measures that growth is concentrating in the upper class.[2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_income_in_the_United_...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_inequality_in_the_Unite...
The video states this too near the end - that 23% over 31 years can also be seen as not much.
I think the main argument is that using the CPI-U or the PCE changes things significantly (from -7% to +23%). There's so many variables in any economic analysis that it's hard to trust any figure that someone shows you.
True, there is a margin of error between different methodologies. CPI shows about half a percent more inflation per year than PCE. Similar arguments apply to measurements of climate change. They miss the forest for the trees.
My gut feeling is that the outcomes for people who use their gut over statistics are significantly better. And if you showed me statistics that they aren't, I'd trust my gut on it.
What's your point?
Who said his (and most people's) gut feelings says "no vaccines"?
"our data clearly show that the VARV lineages eradicated during the 20th century had only been in existence for ∼200 years" https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5196022/
"The German Statistik, first introduced by Gottfried Achenwall (1749), originally designated the analysis of data about the state, signifying the "science of state" (then called political arithmetic in English). It acquired the meaning of the collection and classification of data generally in the early 19th century." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_statistics
This correlation suggests that as soon as people stopped using their gut feelings smallpox evolved to take advantage.
Statisticians preparing the stats on that will never let it be the case.
The parallel is how the brain is wired, and how that effects perception / belief.
Point being, governments create misleading stats, companies create misleading stats, makes me agree even more with the author! PS:- Misleading !=(also, =!) incorrect
This is like asking a performance engineer to optimize the accuracy of a machine learning model, and the engineer fired up gprof. No hire.
...I'd say he came out ahead in that exchange.
We can comment on why we think a practice is bad -- as in, with arguments. Not about how we ditched some candidate because they followed it.