What you do know that ain’t so
In 2006, statistics celebrity Hans Rosling asked students at the Karolinska Insitute about international child mortality. In each of the following pairs of countries (presented in alphabetical order within pairs), which one has higher child mortality?
- Sri Lanka or Turkey?
- Poland or South Korea?
- Malaysia or Russia?
- Pakistan or Vietnam?
- South Africa or Thailand
None of these are close — they differ by at least a factor of two — but the students did significantly worse than chance, averaging less than two correct answers out of five.
Gapminder.org has a new ‘Ignorance Project’ aiming to find out what important facts about global health and welfare are widely misunderstood. They don’t just have a naive ‘information deficiency’ view of this ignorance:
When we encounter ignorance, we want to find a cure. Sometimes the facts just have to be delivered. But in many cases, the facts are little known as they don’t fit with other misunderstandings, they are counterintuitive, such as the most of the outdated concepts about the world population. In these cases we need to invent a new simple way to explain it. Those new explanations are the essence of Gapminder’s new free teaching material that make it fun and easy to teach and to learn a fact-based worldview.
It may not work, but it’s worth a try
PS: the correct answers: Turkey, Poland, Russia, Pakistan, and South Africa are higher.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »