I was recently pointed in the direction of gapminder.org (thanks Brian). What an incredible idea. Their vision is to “unveil the beauty of statistics for a factbased world view.” So, um, no small feat.
Hans Rosling, a site co-founder and multiple-time contributer to TED – the Technology Entertainment and Design conference – has a video on the site titled “Chimpanzees Know Better.” In it, he explains why his highly-educated
students are less successful at identifying countries with higher child mortality rates than a chimpanzee faced with the same task. He says:
Itʼs much tougher to teach facts about the world because we already think we know about the world.
He then goes on to show how his studentsʼ worldview is stuck in the reality of the year that he was born.
Hans Rosling is a professor of global health. But his is an approach we can all learn from. Too often, truth is accepted as truth. The way it is becomes the way it will be. Iʼm looking at you, music industry.
And thatʼs the trouble with truth. It can become too permanent. In a world thatʼs changing quickly, itʼs not just unknowns that need to be explored.
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