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Comment by Bsharp | Hacker News Reader

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.

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... 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.

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.)

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.

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