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The Swede liked to shock his audience by taking off his shirt, shouting “Bring me my sword!” and then slowly pushing the sword deep into his throat until only the hilt could be seen. Then he would pull the sword out and throw a challenging one-liner at his audience: “Sword swallowing is a cultural practice that for thousands of years has forced human beings to think beyond the obvious.”
Hans Rosling was a Swedish doctor, statistician, “data rock-star” (thanks to the advent of TED talks) and the author of the bestseller, Factfulness. It is Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance for 2018. In it, he explores why we get so many facts about the world wrong and what we can do about it – encouraging the reader to think beyond the obvious.
Since its publication in April, the book has acquired must-read status among Silicon Valley executives, thanks in no small part to repeated endorsements by Bill Gates. A friend of Rosling’s, he described it as “one of the most important books that I have ever read and an indispensable guide to thinking clearly about the world”. Gates – as only a billionaire can – then went further than most of us do with our favourite books. He gave a copy of Factfulness to all new graduates of colleges and universities in the USA, if they registered with his website.
It’s not surprising Gates loved it. Rosling’s counter-intuitive optimism is very Silicon Valley. The book recalled the golden age of the high-tech hub – the era when Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google, could make “Don’t be evil” the motto of their company, and Steve Jobs’s Apple could have as its advertising slogan “Think Different” without (too much) widespread mockery.
Like Jobs, the Swede, who died in 2017 (his children finished the book on his behalf) was part missionary and part showman. His mission was to shake us out of the state of ignorance that convinces us the world is getting worse – when, in fact, it is getting better.
Our overdramatic worldview, in his account, misses the big story of human progress. It manufactures a topsy-turvy reality, a “mega misconception”, whereby global poverty is growing, when in fact it is reducing, levels of education are worse rather than better, and violent crime is going up when the opposite is true. “The world has moved on,” Rosling says. “Our worldview hasn’t.”
He enjoyed playing with his audience to prove this. His preferred set-up was to give his audience of medical students, scientists or investment bankers a multiple-choice quiz to test their level of ignorance. Routinely, they would do “worse than chimpanzees” in answering questions designed to demonstrate his somewhat controversial idea that the “gap” between the rich and the developing world no longer existed. By “worse than chimpanzees” he meant that his audience’s results were worse than random, owing – he believed – to ignorance on a global scale how much the world was getting better. Most of the population, he argues, are somewhere in the middle.
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Subscribe[…] and included it on his 2018 summer reading list. Factfulness also seems to be a must-read for Silicon Valley executives. Bill Gates loved it so much he gave free ebook copies to college graduates. Still, I tried not to […]