Hans & Ola Rosling and the chimp test
The late great Hans Rosling was an interesting character. Rising to prominence at a rather advanced age through a series of landmark TED talks, the medical statistician had been a well respected academic in his native Sweden until he shared his findings with the world — only to find out that said world got it more wrong than chimps…
In one of his seminal talks, aided by his son Ola, the academic asked the TED audience three simple questions about that state of the world — trends in natural disaster deaths, education level amongst women and trends in extreme poverty around the world — and then compared it to public data… and chimps. Interestingly, the chimps beat everyone else: random answers fared better than any sample group, even a select TED talk audience.
The source of this discrepancy hailed from an interesting, eminently human bias that Rosling father and son all but confirmed: we tend to overestimate negative trends. What the data showed (that was 8+ years ago, but chances are these long term trends continued on) was that things tend to improve over a long period of time and that we in turn tend to be more negative than reality. Because reality has a well known optimistic bias. As Ola summed up, whenever you are being asked if anything improved or not, especially over a long period of time, just say they did and you will probably be right.
The Roslings’ little experiment is all the more important today. As we constantly hear about the downfall of democracy, heightened tensions on social media, let alone very real ones in the streets and in Ukraine, all the while coping with leftover trauma from the Covid pandemic or the Trump presidency (especially its ending), we tend to follow in the footsteps of these TED audience members back in 2014 and paint a rather bleak picture of where the world is headed. If anything and despite many tweets to the contrary, things tend to improve. Overall.
There are of course exceptions to every rule, and climate change is clearly one of them. There are also shorter term exceptions to this rule as no trend is ever linear: the overturn of Roe v. Wade in the US, the very fact that Trump got elected back in 2016 or that Putin chose to invade Ukraine in 2022 stand as obvious outliers. Extremely significant ones, ones that we should absolutely follow closely. Climate change for one is undoubtedly the biggest challenge of our times, and it will require immense amounts of efforts, resources and sheer human (or computer) intelligence to significantly improve that situation.
But there is strong possibility that we will indeed improve said situation and that our children and grandchildren, although not safe from any environmental risk by any means, may feel less of a burden than we currently do, if we manage to scale burgeoning carbon negative technologies all the while vastly improving the energy efficiency of our homes, industries and means of transportation — and caring about the rest of the ESG spectrum, from biodiversity to human wellbeing (i.e. the point of this website). All of that is possible and not merely a naive picture drawn by out of touch theoreticians — we are none of those things…
There is value in fear, as it stands as a great motivator for change. However, one should not over-correct because of that, because fear tends to trigger reverse movement. And we very much to move forward if we want things to effectively change. Thus creating the virtuous circle that Hans & Ola Rosling’s data show over centuries…
This is a repost from my side project, There is nothing wrong with you.