Use data to change your worldview

By: Anna Cave

​How Hans Rosling taught us that the world is doing better than we think. 

Hans Rosling changed how the world saw data. Data can feel intimidating, particularly for those outside the realm of media and data analytics, but Rosling showed the world that data, when visualized properly, work as an essential element for storytelling and communicating messages.
 
Rosling worked to shift perspectives by dispelling myths about the Third World. After collecting data from credible sources, such as the United Nations and World Bank, Rosling would load it into Gapminder, the visualization software he created that was later bought by Google in 2007, to share with the world in a way they could understand. 

Rosling shared his work in a co-authored novel with Anna Rosling Ronnlund and Ola Rosling titled Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World, where they discuss 10 things that commonly distort our perspective on global trends. 

Rosling also hosted several TED Talks and we are here to share our top three: 

How not to be ignorant about the world | Hans and Ola Rosling
Hans and his son, Ola, unpack how typical answering questions based on the “worst places” rather than by the majority has become. Hans explains how personal, teaching and news bias impact our ability to see the world through a factual lens and how damaging these biases are to our intuitions. The pair encourages us to generalize the world more positively by dispelling a few misconceptions about how the world really works. ​

The best stats you’ve ever seen | Hans Rosling
This talk includes a lot of the same examples as the talk above, but Rosling dives deeper into the importance of using context when it comes to strategizing solutions for world problems. This talk was made in 2006, so it is interesting to watch in 2021 knowing what we know now about the changes in big data.

Let my dataset change your mindset | Hans Rosling
In this talk, Rosling describes the vast differences between populations even within the same country. Many individuals don’t realize the improvement of other countries in relation to the United States, which is a damaging mindset. Rosling talks about how there is more division amongst countries but how we are headed towards less division between countries.