ABSTRACT
How do we know what the needs of the world are? In an amusing and revealing TED talk given in June 2014 in Berlin, Swedish researchers Hans and Ola Rosling revealed to a stunned audience how ignorant about the world most of us really are (TED, 2014). According to their research, most people give less accurate responses than even a random set of answers would be to questions about global issues like economic inequality, literacy rates among women or rates of vaccination for measles. Most of us, they argue, draw conclusions about the world based on our personal prejudices, emerging from our very particular and unrepresentative backgrounds. We, all of us, draw on largely outdated facts, and we often have no idea how to draw generalised conclusions from the few facts that we do know. In short, we have a high level of ignorance. In multiple-choice tests, we perform worse than random (worse, in the Roslings’ presentation, than chimps). The Roslings go on to offer their audience advice about ‘how not to be ignorant about the world’ and point out that those who are going to shape the world for the future need to do so on the basis of knowledge.
