Hans and Ola Rosling: How not to be ignorant about the world

https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_and_ola_rosling_how_not_to_be_ignorant_about_the_world

There are two speakers in this talk. One is Hans Rosling, who is a global health expert. The other one is Hans' son, Ola Rosing, who is the director of Gapminder Foundation. In this talk, they tried to remind people that the reality of the world is sometimes different than what we assumed. In fact, the reality is sometimes better than what we originally expected.

Hans started to conduct a poll to the general public and the audiences in TED conference. He asked three questions about the global trends. The are three questions.
1. How many deaths from natural disasters changed over the last century?
2. How long the average 30 years old women spend in school?
3. How did the percent of people living in extreme poverty changed in the last decades?
The actual answers for those questions are totally different than what people chose. Actually, on every question, people's answers are very pessimistic compared to the reality. To explain this phenomenon, Hans did a survey to the media in Europe and the U.S. He got similar results. Therefore, Hans concluded that the real problem is not that people does not see the news, the problem is that the media themselves also has false impression of how the world works.

Then Hans' son, Ola spoke the second half of the topic. He tried to explain why people are so ignorant about the real world. Ola said it is not people's fault, he believed that our answers came out because we didn't do research in these topics, so we simply biased by our past experiences or intuitions to answer those questions. Our outdated information could unintentionally come from text books or teachers. Even media gave people outdated information. Ola then proposed four rules of thumb about the attitudes to get around these biases. Their investigation suggests that most things are improving. The worlds are gradually getting better. The second one is that the gap between rich and poor is not widening(My opinion: On global scale, for the majority of developed/developing countries nowadays, the gap between super rich and the others for sure is widening). Third, the countries do not have to be very rich to have social welfare such as children education. The last one is that dangerous are sometimes overestimated. For example, sharks don't kill many people on global scale. Shark attacks are extremely rare.

Finally, Ola explained that why understanding the global trend knowledge is important. Because the global power shift, the economic status of people living in relative poor countries will becomes richer and gradually having more influences. No matter for enterprises or individuals, it is better to understand them more.