Erin Liebe Professor Tyler Frazier Evolving Solutions- DATA 150 25 August 2020
“The Best Stats You’ve Ever Seen” Reflection
In Hans Rosling’s introduction to his TED Talk, he noted how even some of the most intelligent college-educated students fall victim to the common misconceptions about developing countries. The mission to reveal this misunderstanding has grown some momentum recently as our access to information about people of foreign cultures, lifestyles, and regions is constantly increasing. For example, after the recent tragedy in Beirut, Lebanon, I saw a few news sources remind the audience that Lebanon is not a vast unurbanized desert, but rather it is fertile, surrounded by water, and has hundreds of cities. Thankfully, technology allows societies to be more globally connected than ever before. Even scrolling through social media for pleasure can help combat this issue by allowing people to interact with or be exposed to foreign countries without even searching to be informed.
Rosling divided some countries into their regions to reveal just how shallow the data we consume often is. It was helpful to see the averages of the countries on the charts, but that data has been simplified and collapsed into a chart that is easy to comprehend yet unable to convey the variability within a single country or even continent. Rosling mentioned how society tends to speak about Africa as if there is a one-size fits all solution that will satisfy the needs of each individual country. In the United States, if we dissolved state borders and dismissed local and state governments to allow the federal government to apply universal legislation, our political, economic, and social climate would be devastated. Yet, we apply the same concept to a whole entire continent because we are uninformed about the individuality of African countries. There is a paucity of incentive to self-inform, prompting people to take comfort in their effortless ignorance rather than spending lots of time and effort trying to collect hard-to-access information in order to properly educate themselves on a place they have no connection to.
Granting public access to some data from NGOs, the UN, and national statistical agencies would be a huge leap towards becoming better informed. While the typical person will probably not want to sift through lots of data that has been broken down by country or maybe even province or region, there will be someone that will. People like Hans Rosling will spend the time to create the easily understandable charts and lectures that highlight this information that is otherwise hidden behind the fees, passwords, and dullness that Rosling believes keeps the average person from gaining access to data from the UN, for example. This will at least make it easier for us to inform ourselves in an expansive manner and possibly inspiring interest to learn more about those we tend to judge by what we’ve seen in Disney’s Aladdin or Tarzan.