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Comment by jnbiche | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

He mentioned that the huge economic gulf has turned into a gentle slope, but there's certainly still a cultural definition of "the west".

Yes, I was absolutely referring to the cultural West (which I'd guess is the population in which he and the rest of the GapMinder project will continue to find this bias) rather than the socioeconomic West.

"In all the questions except one or two, the majority chose the response with the closest value to the correct response."

This seems to be directly contradicted by the data presented in the article. I must be confused about your meaning. Can you elaborate?

Yes, I'm not being clear. To elucidate, I'm not saying they chose the correct responses, I'm saying most respondents chose the answers that were quantitatively closest to the correct responses, without actually choosing the correct responses.

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.

This is incorrect for all but one (maybe two) of the questions. The one you specifically mentioned, about literacy, is totally wrong. The answers are just about evenly distributed between 40% and 60%, with far more choosing 20% over the correct answer: 80%.

I think jnbiche has a potentially interesting point. There are only five sample questions revealed in the article, however, so we can't know, unless we have access to all the data, whether his claimed pattern actually holds.

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.

In his very first talk, the anecdote was that he polled Swedish professors at his university, i.e. his colleagues, and got lower than 25%, and he consequently compared them to chimpanzees in the same way.

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.

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