How not to be ignorant about the world
The TED
talk I choose to review was: “How not
to be ignorant about the world”, and it explains just how to do that. The talk was done by Swedish Global Health Professor
Hans Rosling, and his son Ola Rosling, the head of Gapminder Foundation. The talk opens with Hans giving a short test
to the audience about various world health issues, such as how many people have
died because of natural disasters or how many people live in poverty. The
audience does generally poorly on the test, and he explains that it is because
of 4 main factors: Environmental bias, outdated available information, Media
bias, and our own intuition.
After the
test Hans passes the talk to Ola, who explains how we can change our intuition
from a weakness into strength again by looking at common misconceptions and how
people react to them and showing alternate ways to view them. The conceptions looked at are: “things always
get worse over time” and after looking at the data, to reevaluate it as, “things
usually improve over time”; “there is a large discrepancy between rich and poor
people, and that’s bad” and change it into “most people are actually somewhere
in the middle”.
All of
these points are presented well, with bits of comedy strewn throughout, and are
tied together nicely. I think that many
of these points are correct, and that ignorance in our society can easily be
fixed by changing our own view points and learning to overcome what we were
taught if it happens to be wrong. The
way that Hans and his son express their ideas turns the talk from a discussion
of world statistics many people would dismiss as boring and give them a comedic
twist to really engage the audience. Overall,
I enjoyed Hans and Ola as speakers, and would want to watch any more TED talks
they may do later.
Being open to our own ignorance is probably key, eh?
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