I recently bought the book Factfulness – Ten Reasons we’re wrong about the world – And why things are better than you think by Hans Rosland (with Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Rönnlund). The book is a fascinating read and I recommend it to everyone. Not just people working with data. Not just journalists. Not just “people from rich countries”. Everyone. Literally everyone who is able to read. This book changes the way you think about the world.
For those of you who don’t know Hans Rosling, he was a well known doctor, speaker, statistician and much more. He has delivered many famous TED Talks about poverty, growing population and other topics. Hans was able to deliver his message using simple statistics and charts. He’s also famous of pioneering the “bubble chart”, was was developed with his son Ola and his daughter-in-law Anna. An example:
You can find animated bubble charts in almost any serious business intelligence / data visualization tool. The book is the culmination of Hans’ life work and the last project he finished before his death in 2017. Using 10 chapters, Hans explains different instincts on why we perceive the world to be much worse off than it is in reality. In each chapter, he explains an instinct, along with some anecdotes of his travels – and he tells us how we can deal with this instinct.
The reason this book is also interesting for data professionals is because although it’s not a technical book, it beautifully shows how you can use facts and data to change people’s minds. A must-read.
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Rosling is/was the cleverest of manipulators, since he knew and understood quantitative techniques. He understood what was PC and how to present things and thus got well and properly funded. Not a person to mourn.
A few examples to support my case:
(1) The “best of all worlds” fallacy: Demonstrating how wasteful market economy is, and how in another world with a better controlled economy, a (very) large number of people can be supported. The fallacy, of course, is that by ALL experience, in practice ANY heavily managed economy is vastly less efficient than a reasonably free market economy. Promoting wishful thinking in that way is simply irresponsible.
(2) The “no mixing pot” fallacy: In a video Rosling demonstrates with green and yellow bags that even if Westerners, a green bag, reproduces without multiplying, – while others, yellow bags, increase in numbers, the green bag would persist and keep a place in the world. The fallacy, of course, is that outsiders migrate and appropriate Western societies to make them unrecognizable and effectively un-livable for traditional Westerners.
(3) The “praise past, forget future” fallacy: While praising how much population growth has decreased in irresponsible growth regions and conveniently extending this trend, Rosling “forgets” to consider whether expected future growth can be accommodated at all. The fallacy is seen by comparison to a car. When approaching a hard wall any braking is useful, even if the collision can still be fatal. When approaching a large drop, it hardly matters if you enter the vertical fall at a horizontal speed of 50 or 20 mph. I propose societal disintegration from overpopulation is more like the drop case.
morlindk, SQL MCSE, applied statistician