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Comment by vitorbaptistaa | Hacker News Reader

If you enjoyed this post, I highly recommend reading Factfulness by Hans Rosling. He spent his later years trying to educate the public on the realities of the world. This book contains a series of tips on how to understand facts.

His TED talks are masterpieces as well.

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I really enjoyed Factfulness and in general enjoy his work and talks. But I would recommend also reading some of the criticism it received. Some really interesting discussions came from the publishing of that book

Could you share some entry points to the criticism?

A great paper [1] (published by Linköping University) criticizes the book's unbalanced optimism and bias:

"Factfulness actually employs a biased selection of variables, avoids analysis of negative trends, and does not discuss any of the serious challenges related to continual population growth. A policy based on the simplistic worldview presented in Factfulness could have serious consequences."

[1]: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/328759928_Good_Thin...

But wasn't one of Roslings main points that we should strive to make Africa wealthy so that they get fewer kids? (Because the richer the country, the less kids are born) So basically his whole point was that he wanted to stop this unsustainable population growth in Africa.

Or am I misremembering?

Also improving access to contraceptives and fighting potential taboo surrounding it. PSI is one charity whose purpose is to improve access to healthcare services including that.

Here's a quick quiz from his team on how you understand your world:

https://upgrader.gapminder.org/

I was surprised at how the world is doing.

Some of these questions really depend on context. They give you usually three numbers and the right answer is usually either the highest or lowest number.

For example, it asks how many women are CEO's in a America? And it gives the choice of 5% , 10% and 18% . The right answer is 18% which then makes you feel like 'oh that's a lot'.

But I think the sentiment would be different if it started at 18% being the lowest. The result and how you feel about it changes.

absolutely agree. Hans Rosling was amazing for presenting data in a visual and easy to digest way.

Was very sad when he passed away back in 2017.

Indeed. And additionally, I have often wondered what opinions and impact he would have had during the Covid pandemic

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