Hans Rosling: Do you know more about the world than a chimpanzee?
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
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.
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.
Here is "related" video about wisdom of crowd: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOucwX7Z1HU
I wonder if we could apply idea of "wisdom of crowd" to those quiz questions.
"Don't Panic — The Truth About Population"
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:
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.
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.
This seems to be directly contradicted by the data presented in the article. I must be confused about your meaning. Can you elaborate?
So if:
a = 5
b = 10
c = 15
d = 20
And the correct answer is d, I'm saying most respondents chose c, for most of the questions. We could calculate the odds of them doing this for 9 out of 10 questions if they were choosing at random: the binomial distribution shows us that it's a very small probability (I calculate 0.0000286102294921875, but that may be off a little).
It's a little more complicated here we're dealing with the average probabilities of many individual events, and to be honest I'm not sure how to account for that (if it even makes any difference, perhaps a statistician can chip in?). But they're almost certainly doing much better than chimpanzees.
Of the five, four are quantitative. Of those, #1 does not follow jnbiche's pattern; #2, the literacy question, does follow the pattern if you look at the "all respondents" number, but, as you suggest, the numbers are too close; #3 follows the pattern, but there are two answers equidistant from the correct answer, which complicates the analysis; #5 does follow the pattern.
Rosling's discovery, that we do worse than random on tests like these, is fascinating, despite so many people here becoming distracted by the rhetorical device of the chimpanzee. But that only holds if you merely tabulate right and wrong answers. jnbiche is pointing out that there might be a deeper pattern to the data that could make us look better, perhaps almost as good as random.
I wonder how easy it would be to design other surveys that exploited bad preconceptions to get a worse-than-random result. Maybe in other fields, like science.
Really, the whole chimpanzee thing is for helping explain why "lower than X%" means "worse than random chance" and nothing else.
The important paragraph in the article was this:
> The fact that humans do worse than chimps shows the problem is not a lack of knowledge, but the result of having preconceived ideas, Rosling says - ideas that are years, or sometimes decades out of date.
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.
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?
I'd be interested in what populations you think have high birth rates, will continue to do so, and how big those populations are...
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.
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.)
Video section is full of gems.
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/