TED
5 HN recommenders · recommended in 8 months, 2015–2023
19:10 · 3.1M views · Sep 11, 2014
Hans Rosling and his son Ola run an audience quiz with global population, health and income data to show how wrong most people are about the world. Ola then gives four ways to get less ignorant.
Recommended as evidence that the world is improving despite negative news, and for how people misjudge global trends.
8 comments from Hacker News
I'm not sure if capitalism deserves the credit or not, but you are completely correct when you say that life is much, much better now than it was even in the recent past. To those who doubt this: Please watch Hans Rosling's talk first, which I will link below. I promise it is not a waste of your time. this video
You really should watch this Hans Rosling's TED talk: this video It's not misleading. Malnutrition is going down, lack of education is going down, lack of access to healthcare is going down. The more you read the Guardian, the more you have misconceptions about how bad the world is developing.
Not the person you were responding to, but I learned it from this TED talk: this video (Not joking in the least. It's a very good presentation. Title is: How not to be ignorant about the world | Hans and Ola Rosling)
Hans Rosling had a talk about this topic[1] 6 years ago, albeit less about "mean" and more about how "bad" the world was, and more importantly, how bad people thought the world was compared to how it actually is. Not too surprisingly, even media and journalists scored worse than random guessing. So it's hard to point fingers to the viewer getting wrong impression of the world when the information senders themselves can't measure it (or send it) correctly [1] this video
Can you provide some sources? Last time I looked into statistics on these topics I found the opposite to be true. The brothers Rosling have a nice talk about how all the big stats are improving globally (gender equality, education, health, extreme poverty, life expectation) this video