Finals. In just a few short weeks comes that time of the school year when students sit down to tests that have the sole purpose of showing how much they know. Or as some would put it, the purpose of the tests is to show how much they don’t know. Gapminder’s “Ignorance Survey” fits into this second way of thinking.
Gapminder is a foundation that promotes a better understanding of statistics to aid in global development. It’s cofounder, and most visible spokesperson, is Hans Rosling, a Swedish medical doctor, statistician, and professor of global health. (To see Rosling and his statistics very much in action, go to “5 Stat Sites That Eat Pie Charts for Lunch.”)
If you’re not worried about finding out what you don’t know, click over to The Guardian‘s “Population Quiz: How Well Do You Know the World?” It’s an interactive collection of 9 questions from Gapminder’s “Ignorance Project,” covering such topics as life expectancy, education, and income.
After you’re done, come back and watch Hans Rosling and his son, Ola, explain in a TED Talk how our intuition has been hijacked—to the point where most people, including educators and the media, score worse on Rosling’s tests than if they’d picked the answers at random. Or as the Roslings put it, they do worse than chimps grabbing at bananas. “Only preconceived ideas can make us perform worse than random,” says the elder Rosling, at the “Ignorance Project” page.
At the end of their talk, they give four “practical tricks” for overcoming those preconceived ideas. But before you jump ahead, if you haven’t done it already, you really should try the “Population Quiz.” If you don’t know what you don’t know, you won’t know what you need to know.
(The “Population Quiz” will calculate your score, and if you don’t get 100% right, click on “Show Answers” at the bottom of the results page.)
(Hans Rosling, “Population Quiz: How Well Do You Know the World?” The Guardian, November 7, 2013)
[photo: “Confused,” by CollegeDegrees360, used under a Creative Commons license]
Clearing Customs 