How not to be ignorant about the world

So I chose the talk “How not to be ignorant about the world” for this task. This talk is performed by Hans Rosling, which is well known in the TED community with his highly entertaining way of presenting information. In this talk, he covers common misconceptions about the world as we know it. By reffering directly to the audience with his data, he provides several facts and viewing points about how ignorant, regular people and the media can be wrong about many real-life statistics.

His presentation surrounded the subject about how little people actually know about the world, and clears up a lot of misconceptions. This subject is something the world is highly misinformed about, where most people have little-to-none knowledge about these matters.

Hans have an ability to make the most boring statistics interesting. By allowing the audience to guess and respond to his questions - and them proving them entirely wrong - he creates this amazing atmosphere which makes it suprisingly easy to follow. This did not come as a surprise, as we have previously seen in several of Mr. Rosling’s videos. He is one of the best TED talkers, and at this point, his video triumphs the top with several million views (whereas the other videos have about 600K).

I picked this talk because I knew from the second I pressed play that this is something I do not want to miss out on. This is something no one should miss out on, really. Learning about these misconceptions in such a ridicilous effective way is quite entertaining. The statistics hits close to home too, as several things I have had the wrong conception about for a long time is cleared up. For example, he mentions the swedes’ view on how many people in third world countries have been vaccinated against Polio. Where most people are guessing everything between 20% - 40%, Hans Rosling shocks the audience by revealing that the numbers actually are closer to 80%! These things are very entertaining to learn about indeed, as only Hans could make stuff like this anything close to interesting.