On February 10, I called Ola Rosling, son of the late Hans Rosling, founder of the Gapminder Foundation and a distinguished edutainer, who has been on a mission to advance a fact-based world view.
Professor Hans Rosling passed away on February 7. He was 68 and leaves the world poorer. He leaves the world at the worst of times when alternative facts, snake oils, smoke and mirrors, witchcraft, fake news and a post-truth paradigm trump a fact-based world view.
How unlucky could the Sustainable Development Goals agenda be?
But we are consoled by the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a four-time US senator, who argued in 1986 that “Everyone is entitled to his opinions, not his own facts.”
The purpose of my call to Ola was to pass on my condolences and find out about memorial services and funeral arrangements for his late, greater-than-life father.
To my amazement, Ola said to me: “I am not sure yet, it should be in the first or second week of March,” and I ask why so long?
He asks back: “How long do you keep the dead before burial?”
And I say to him: “Mostly no more than a week.” This is part of the Swedish culture I was totally ignorant of.
In Nigeria a body can take up to a year before a burial.
Some similarities here are evident.
Professor Hans Rosling’s mission was to ensure that the world view is fact based and not driven by opinions and largely ignorance.
To fight the terror and dominance of opinions, anecdotes and ignorance passing as scientific knowledge, Hans, his son and daughter-in-law created ignorance tests to illustrate in captivating ways how the power of e-mass media through all forms of platforms has fed confidence into an ignorance frenzy.
In an entertaining way they show that the world of chimpanzees is much more informed than the world of human beings.
They test ignorance by asking chimpanzees a number of questions about the world, such as what direction the number of children born in the world will take, the average number of years of school attendance between men and women, and what has happened to the number of years lived by humanity.
In all these questions chimpanzees get a better score than human beings.
Preconceived
This shows how biased and preconceived ideas enter our thought processes and influence our knowledge holdings: the strongly held opinions.
A chimpanzee faced with a choice of three bananas labelled A, B, C for any of the three answers to the questions treats each answer with equal probability: a third each.
In all human populations tested thus far, the Americans and Swedes have scored far lower than chimpanzees on this ignorance questions.
South Africans, on the other hand, on the question of years of schooling, have scored higher than chimpanzees.
The significance of these ignorance tests illustrates how opinions are formed and world views are shaped.
The evidence is that while our environment is crucial, facts play very little role in shaping our opinions. It is this that is the single most toxic characterisation of our knowledge deficiency yet to plague an information society.
Helmut Spinner, of the Institute of Philosophy at the University of Karlsruhe, defines an information society as one that is well informed, where the information of the world is available everywhere to everyone all at the same time.
He opines that the technological limitations are solved, and what remains to be tackled is freedom and literacy.
The Noble laureate Armatya Sen defines development as freedom.
Karl Marx in his dialectical materialism advances that the world is knowable, and Friedrich Engels applied metaphysical insights to propel this notion.
Fact-based
It is becoming more evident that freedom and literacy of individuals to know and understand this knowable universe is what will and should unleash the potential of humanity to solve problems of accumulation, inequality, unemployment and ignorance; in short, the threat to people, prosperity and the planet.
Yet ascendency of alternative facts, post-truth, snake oils, witchcraft, smoke and mirrors are driven with ruthless determination to trump methods and trump facts.
South Africa, through Statistics South Africa, hosted the very first UN World Data Forum (UNWDF) in Cape Town from January 15-18 to advance what Hans and Daniel argue is a fact-based world view for sustainable development goals.
Ensuring that there is public understanding of a fact-based world, that evidence is at the heart of decision-making and ensuring that evidence is of high quality, was Hans Rosling’s mission.
I called Hans in March last year while on my way to the UNStatistics Commission to work on a data literacy strategy, and he told me: “Pali, I am left with two months to live.”
I was shocked and I tried to discuss and encourage him, and he said: “By the way we come from a fact-based world view, the evidence is that I do not have long to live, unless medical science finds a solution.
“Now I am busy writing up what I have done and what needs to be done going forward.”
At the UNWDF held in South Africa in January this year, Jeff Radebe was able to hand over to Professor Hans Rosling, albeit in absentia, the Statistician-General ISIbalo Award for his stellar contribution to unveiling the beauty of statistics, and above all advancing a fact-based world order.
May Professor Hans Rosling’s soul rest in peace and a fact-based view prevail in eternity.
Dr Pali Lehohla is South Africa’s Statistician-General and head of Statistics South Africa.