Hans Rosling Famous Quotes
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People often call me an optimist, because I show them the enormous progress they didn't know about. That makes me angry. I'm not an optimist. That makes me sound naive. I'm a very serious "possibilist". That's something I made up. It means someone who neither hopes without reason, nor fears without reason, someone who constantly resists the overdramatic worldview. As a possibilist, I see all this progress, and it fills me with conviction and hope that further progress is possible. This is not optimistic. It is having a clear and reasonable idea about how things are. It is having a worldview that is constructive and useful.
Cancer is awful. It took 10 years until I didn't think about it every day. Nobody should go through this. Nobody.
I meet so many that think population growth is a major problem in regard to climate change. But the number of children born per year in the world has stopped growing since 1990. The total number of children below 15 years of age in the world are now relatively stable around 2 billion.
The 1 to 2 billion poorest in the world, who don't have food for the day, suffer from the worst disease: globalization deficiency. The way globalization is occurring could be much better, but the worst thing is not being part of it. For those people, we need to support good civil societies and governments.
Fame is easy to acquire; impact is much more difficult.
Well, the truth is I'm very scared for people to dislike me. I have conflict-avoidance.
human beings have a strong dramatic instinct toward binary thinking, a basic urge to divide things into two distinct groups, with nothing but an empty gap in between. We love to dichotomize. Good versus bad. Heroes versus villains. My country versus the rest. Dividing the world into two distinct sides is simple and intuitive, and also dramatic because it implies conflict, and we do it without thinking, all the time.
Never leave a number all by itself. Never believe that one number on its own can be meaningful. If you are offered one number, always ask for at least one more. Something to compare it with.
Let the dataset change your mindset
I have a suggestion for a new name for the developing world. Let's call it the world.
You have to fit in sometimes to make people comfortable to listen to you.
Data allow your political judgments to be based on fact, to the extent that numbers describe realities.
My best friend in medical school was a magician. And we were shown an X-ray of a sword-swallower, and I tried it and failed. Then I got a sword-swallower as a patient, and he taught me.
Good analysis is very useful when you want to convert a political decision into an investment. It can also go the other way and drive policy.
There's still racism. Western Europe ... has taken the native cultures of the Americas, the African cultures, the Asian civilization and lumped them together into The Others.
While teaching a course on global development at Uppsala University in Sweden, I realized our students didn't have a fact-based worldview. They talked about 'we' and 'them.' They thought there were two groups of countries: the Western world, with small families and long lives, and the Third World, with large families and short lives.
There are two billion fellow human beings who live on less than $2 a day.
Constantly test your favorite ideas for weaknesses. Be humble about the extent of your expertise. Be curious about new information that doesn't fit, and information from other fields. And rather than talking only to people who agree with you, or collecting examples that fit your ideas, see people who contradict you, disagree with you, and put forward different ideas as a great resource for understanding the world.
There's about one sword-swallower per 2 to 4 million persons in each country.
We have great international experts within India telling us that the climate is changing, and actions has to be taken, otherwise China and India would be the countries most to suffer from climate change.
I am a toxico-nutritional neuro-epidemiologist. It's the study of neurological disorders caused by a mixture of toxins and malnutrition using epidemiological methods ... We are just three or four in the world, even fewer than sword swallowers.
I have a neighbor who knows 200 types of wine ... I only know two types of wine - red and white. But my neighbor only knows two types of countries - industrialized and developing. And I know 200.
The shining star in the world is Shanghai. That's what CEOs from big companies say - 'if I want mathematical analytical work done, it's done in China.'
I loved statistics from a young age. And I studied very much in Sweden. I used to be in the upper quarter of all courses I attended. But in St. John's, I was in the lower quarter. And the fact was that Indian students studied harder than we did in Sweden. They read the textbook twice, or three times or four times.
Most important of all, we should be teaching our children humility and curiosity.
Being humble, here, means being aware of how difficult your instincts can make it to get the facts right. It means being realistic about the extent of your knowledge. It means being happy to say "I don't know." It also means, when you do have an opinion, being prepared to change it when you discover new facts. It is quite relaxing being humble, because it means you can stop feeling pressured to have a view about everything, and stop feeling you must be ready to defend your views all the time.
Being curious means being open to new information and actively seeking it out. It means embracing facts that don't fit your worldview and trying to understand their implications. It means letting your mistakes trigger curiosity instead of embarrassment. "How on earth could I be so wrong about that fact? What can I learn from that mistake? Those people are not stupid, so why are they using that solution?" It is quite exciting being curious, because it means you are always discovering something interesting.
You don't have to get rich to have [fewer] children. It has happened across the world.
If you have democracy, people will vote for washing machines. They love them!
Fame is a dangerous thing. It's what the post-industrial society wants. They want fame and many followers on Twitter. But to really make the world understandable, that challenge is remaining.
Half of the energy is used by one seventh of the world's population.
Few people will appreciate the music if I just show them the notes. Most of us need to [hear it].
Slow change is still change
Does saying "things are improving" imply that everything is fine, and we should all relax and not worry? No, not at all. Is it helpful to have to choose between bad and improving? Definitely not. It's both. It's both bad and better. Better, and bad, at the same time. That is how we must think about the current state of the world.
The number of children is not growing any longer in the world. We are still debating peak oil, but we have definitely reached peak child.
The idea is to go from numbers to information to understanding.
Resist blaming any one individual or group of individuals for anything. Because the problem is that when we identify the bad guy, we are done thinking. And it's almost always more complicated than that. It's almost always about multiple interacting causes--a system. If you really want to change the world, you have to understand how it actually works. . . . Blaming an individual often steals the focus from other possible explanations and blocks our ability to prevent similar problems in the future. . . . Accept that bad things can happen without anyone intending them to.