We are running out of categories. Really, everyone will have availability to the book given that the chances that one person will upload it is pretty darn high if it isn't already available.
I like to think of myself as reasonably well-informed and unbiased, with a pretty decent set of tools for looking at things I see in the news but when I read it recently I learned quite a lot. It's a very good book.
One of the best things about reaching the Bill Gates level of wealth is probably being able to say, "man, I really liked this book, I think every college graduate should read it," and then realizing you can literally buy it for all of them.
I regularly buy books for friends for whom I think it would be useful. Sometimes business books for entrepreneur friends, sometimes fiction that I think they would enjoy (or I really want to talk to them about!).
Nothing stopping any of us from doing something similar at a smaller scale. (though the ability to reach people who we don't know, at a large scale, is definitely much much harder)
Who knows how much this is even costing him. It's pretty good PR for the publishing company and will probably generate sales from non-graduates. Could just be a genius marketing move which benefits brand Gates and the publisher.
It is incredibly important to see that the world on a macro level is improving at an incredible rate. Hans Rosling was a brilliant educator and while I haven't read this book yet, I will be adding it to my backlog today.
As others have said, it's a good thought to have (and the book indeed sounds like an interesting read), but we should still define what "on a macro level" actually means.
E.g., is "macro level" the average? Then it could just as well be a rich elite (or the spike part of a power law distribution) pulling up that average.
Even if it's not, we should investigate how different parts of the world are improving differently and why.
E.g., yes, eradicating certain diseases in African countries is laudable - but in an age where others dream about genetically augmenting humans, is that the bar we should use?
And even if the overall measure of health and well-being might go up, why is it that nevertheless statistics for certain groups seem to regress? Like job security or the ability of low/middle-income groups to make savings?
Hans Rosling's work is famous for pointing out how media incentives, statistical illiteracy, and our preconceptions give us a flawed sense of the world.
In the vein of Hans Rosling, I've done add'l research on media coverage vs actual stats for death. What's covered is what we most want to read about. As a society, we need many more lessons on statistics and the incentives behind news:
The deaths that are most covered are a tiny fraction (<1%) of the way we die
EDIT: As some commenters point, news covers "new" things — and so of course it's at odds with data.
The problem is that most consumers of news don't understand that just because something is heavily covered doesn't mean it's common — or relevant input for personal decisions they make. This speaks to the issue of media literacy, and I'd argue is why Rosling's book is so important.
The fundamental problem in media is their financial incentives, leading to clickbait articles, and sometimes even fake news.
Government subsidies for proper, independent news reporting could help tremendously here. But unfortunately, now all politicians are looking at Facebook to solve the problem.
I think another way is to train readers to understand the issues, and over decades, change the incentives faced by media. Or for us to push back on the incentives that social networks set for media outlets.
I wrote a media literacy guide for engineers in this vein:
Are government-owned news outlets significantly better on this particular issue (of deaths)? What does the BBC, CBC, ABC, Al-Jazeera cover? I'd wager it's substantially similar. You'd have to have orders of magnitude more articles about people dying of heart disease (or whatever) to make up for it, and I don't think eg. the BBC spends its resources that way.
> The deaths that are most covered are a tiny fraction (<1%) of the way we die
They are precisely covered because they are exceptional. No one care about car accidents because that's a banal cause of death. But a plane crash is not. In countries like France where islamic terror attacks have became common place, small scale attacks causing a few deaths are not covered for days and days anymore.
Also event like a terror attack informs more about the state of a country and the world than an one suicide (suicide rate or aggregate can be valuable insight hough).
Of course. By its very nature, outliers are the only thing that news covers. Exceptions make news. Conventions do not. If you're hearing it on the news, it's useless information, like a TouTube video of a cat playing the piano while juggling mice.
Once upon a time, I think news was an invitation to get engaged in your community because change was needed or forthcoming, and as a citizen, it was your duty to know about the subject in order to contribute constructively, perhaps in a town hall meeting or at least in a civic (civil) conversation with neighbors.
Today nobody acts upon what they learn in big media news, other than to form misinformed opinions fraught with bias, to vote only every few years for a bad binary choice in rigged elections fielding untrustworthy candidates who pretend to address problems but actually perpetuate them via myopic self-interested gangsterism.
And given that the point of entertainment, from the perspective of “the elite” (government officials but also other wealthy and powerful individuals who are a part of the same de facto governing system) the primary purpose of entertainment isn’t much different from a form of propaganda anyways. Mass media is largely about programming the populace. Now of course it’s not all produced with malicious intent, but that doesn’t stop the powers that be from influencing them, and by extension “the people” through mass media.
But this is just my relatively uninformed opinion based on casual observation, not any serious study of the issue. Although given that if this were studied and published in a journal it would have likely gone through institutions which are subject to the same system which would be criticized by the research so...how much good could that really do?
I suppose my cynicism towards the people I’m supposed to trust is the primary thing prevents me from having a more fact based view of the world.
Perhaps at one point I was realistic but I think at this point I’ve seen enough blatant deception that I am overly paranoid as sort of a defense mechanism. This is probably still more accurate than how I viewed things before, but all I really meant by cynicism is that I am conscious of the fact that I am probably even more distrustful than what would be reasonable, just as a result of negative experience. Perhaps I’m right, but I don’t have an objective rationale for this, it’s largely based on heuristics.
To be a bit more concrete, it’s true that politicians and the media are liars, but then to extend that further to education, entertainment, and those who are culturally influential in general can be quite the stretch outside of a few specific data points. And how is it connected? How does this system actually work? It’s so complex it’s almost immeasurable. A critical view of this is necessarily heavily influenced by intuition and emotion IMO since you’re unable to trust a large body of your learned information from that mindset.
Consumers with poor sense of perspective and poor critical-thinking skills are more easily manipulated by advertisers. Therefore, dumbing down your viewers is in your direct financial interest.
No, because the exception is with respect to people's experiences, not with respect to what the news reports. People experience regular stuff every day, whether the news reports it or not.
The deregulated "news" industry is primarily motivated by profit, informing the public is secondary. That's why we see a handful of stories on repeat for days - maximizes profit, minimize journalism and education.
I would say they deserve different kinds of coverage.
A plane crash or terrorist attack is the kind of immediate news story that can dominate a news cycle for a week and that makes sense. But news papers and magazines also devote plenty of coverage to long term, on going problems, such as the coverage devoted to sexual harassment in the past year. And indeed, even when there have been no major terror attacks in several months, there is still always an endless stream of articles discussing the issue and how we might best approach it.
We should expect that our news sources to devote more of their long form, investigative pieces to domestic problems like heart disease and traffic accidents.
Just so that people don't get the wrong idea: small scale terror attacks are not commonplace in France, nor anywhere else in Europe, by any reasonable sense of the word. From what I can recall, there have been two instances of fatal Islamist terror attacks in France in 2018. It's certainly in the single digits.
I don't think it's media that fuels are fear of terrorism, I think it's actually the Terrorism. You are implying that the media makes it out to be worse than it is, I disagree. I think the media largely downplays terrorism and makes sure that we all think it just fell out of the sky and it's just crazy people and there's no rhyme or reason to it so there's no way to predict anything or take any action to stop it. The media just mollifies us and makes sure we don't get angry or take any steps, or do anything at all about it all except feel bad for the victims.
What a fantastic gift, Hans Rosling was great, I love him! May he rest in peace. The day he died, which was about one and a half year ago, was a sad day indeed.
I think some misunderstand this book, maybe because there is a tendency to interpret any talk about how the world is improving as blindness about world problems. Or that admitting there have been gains made is the same as saying it's time to take it easy, stop trying to improve.
This is nonsense of course. The point of finding out what has improved is to find out what works, and do more of that. See if you can apply what works in one place to another place, another problem.
I'm pretty sure the statistic is that every year 1 in 7 people in the U.S. face hunger.
Saying 1 in 7 people in the U.S. face hunger every year implies that the same group of people are hungry year after year. While a large portion of the hungry population probably are hungry multiple years, surely not all of them repeat every year.
Arguably, turning college graduates into better citizens by giving them a book can have a bigger long-term effect than directly solving the problem. Not that immediate action shouldn't be done, but both are valid attacks to the same problem.
I think Bill Gates' underlying reasoning is that by giving all college graduates this book, the future generation will be better thinkers and therefore that society will be better than today's. Hopefully, this will lead to a situation where that 1 in 7 number will turn into 1 in 70, and every place in the US will have access to clean water.
It's kind of like that saying "Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.".
Also, any good is better than no good, if by requiring a person to pursue the maximum good, they would have not had the emotional catalysis for pursuing the good.
'It’s the same every month, Dreier says. Bills go unpaid because, when push comes to shove, food wins out. “We have to eat, you know,” she says, only the slightest hint of resignation in her voice. “We can’t starve.”'
But in the very same article:
"Chances are good that if you picture what hunger looks like, you don’t summon an image of someone like Christina Dreier: white, married, clothed, and housed, even a bit overweight."
A bit overweight. That is not what starvation looks like. That is not what hunger looks like.
We can talk all day about strategies for strengthening the social safety net, but it is simply not true that people are going hungry in the United States.
Your intuition that the existence of more than one bad things means that people can't solve other bad things is exceedingly wrong. It flies in the face of the fact that humans regularly tackle more than one issue at a time.
Also, its not lets. Someone else is buying this book, not us. Their money does not belong to us. So we do not have the right to claim credit for this charitable deed. You especially, in opposition to this charitable deed, do not have any claim to it.
Gitlab seems to be picking up the pace and gaining mindshare among developers.
Freelancers I'm curious, would you switch and lose your repos' stars, PRs, fork counts? Those are actually a good marketing tool for potential customers since they see you are legitimate.
It all depends on how we define better, and for any negative situation, you can change your definition of better so it is not included.
If one believes that all human life is equally valuable, even when still in the womb, then our world has become drastically worse. Worldwide, the population of America is aborted every 6 years, or one WW2 every year.
Or, consider Iceland's recent achievement in eradicating Down's syndrome, by killing all babies with Down's syndrome.
Our world has dramatically improved in certain aspects of livelihood, but has dramatically worsened in our respect for human life. Proof of this statement is the average reader's inability to comprehend what I've just written.
I don't think the average reader has a problem comprehending what you wrote, they just don't define better the way that you do (ie they don't include unborn babies lives as equally valuable until a certain age in the womb). Your core point that given any set of facts you can define a value system such that it's improving is true, but that's not how most people define their value system.
I think maybe OP was just trying to say that the means matter - not just the end. End state of no more down syndrome humans is good, but maybe just aborting them all before they are born isn't good - depending on your beliefs/values. I think it is a valid point to consider even if their tone wasn't very constructive.
On the other hand, just because a point is valid doesn't mean it is also useful. Especially compared to all the other points that could be raised in its stead.
> Proof of this statement is the average reader's inability to comprehend what I've just written.
This statement is ridiculous without providing some sort of evidence to support your assertion that the average reader is unable to comprehend your statement. I might guess that we are to assume that a low score for your comment is such evidence, but the arrogance of such a position is so astounding that I'm inclined to give you the benefit of the doubt and say you just left off any support for your assertion at all rather than assuming you're the sort of person who would nonironically proclaim that "Nobody understands my genius because I am so deep!"
It would be great if the publisher would make digital copies of this book available to everyone for free. I wonder if Gates explored that option but the price was too steep.
I just finished this last night in fact. My first thought upon completing it was that this should be required reading in every high school curriculum. Very cool to see this happening. Highly recommended read.
Funny. I just graduated and bought the physical copy like last week. It’ll be nice to have the ebook too. I haven’t really started it yet, because sadly I hoard books, and collect a lot faster than I read. I’m interested in the topic though. I would love to learn more about how we make mistakes in our assumptions, and statistical fallacies.
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[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 71.8 ms ] threadAnyway, I hope it's a clever trick to get people to feel like they beat the system and go read the book.
Nothing stopping any of us from doing something similar at a smaller scale. (though the ability to reach people who we don't know, at a large scale, is definitely much much harder)
How would this, as a "marketing move", make any sense for him - or even be worth his time to do in the first place?
E.g., is "macro level" the average? Then it could just as well be a rich elite (or the spike part of a power law distribution) pulling up that average.
Even if it's not, we should investigate how different parts of the world are improving differently and why.
E.g., yes, eradicating certain diseases in African countries is laudable - but in an age where others dream about genetically augmenting humans, is that the bar we should use?
And even if the overall measure of health and well-being might go up, why is it that nevertheless statistics for certain groups seem to regress? Like job security or the ability of low/middle-income groups to make savings?
In the vein of Hans Rosling, I've done add'l research on media coverage vs actual stats for death. What's covered is what we most want to read about. As a society, we need many more lessons on statistics and the incentives behind news:
The deaths that are most covered are a tiny fraction (<1%) of the way we die
https://www.nemil.com/s/part3-horror-films.html
Today’s biggest threat to democracy isn’t fake news—it’s selective facts
https://qz.com/1130094/todays-biggest-threat-to-democracy-is...
How Media Fuels our Fear of Western Terrorism
https://www.nemil.com/s/part2-terrorism.html
EDIT: As some commenters point, news covers "new" things — and so of course it's at odds with data.
The problem is that most consumers of news don't understand that just because something is heavily covered doesn't mean it's common — or relevant input for personal decisions they make. This speaks to the issue of media literacy, and I'd argue is why Rosling's book is so important.
Government subsidies for proper, independent news reporting could help tremendously here. But unfortunately, now all politicians are looking at Facebook to solve the problem.
I wrote a media literacy guide for engineers in this vein:
https://github.com/nemild/hack-an-engineer
If your reporting depends on government subsidies, it's very much not independent.
They are precisely covered because they are exceptional. No one care about car accidents because that's a banal cause of death. But a plane crash is not. In countries like France where islamic terror attacks have became common place, small scale attacks causing a few deaths are not covered for days and days anymore.
Also event like a terror attack informs more about the state of a country and the world than an one suicide (suicide rate or aggregate can be valuable insight hough).
Like Rosling, the point is that we need to understand why the media covers things the way it does.
Once upon a time, I think news was an invitation to get engaged in your community because change was needed or forthcoming, and as a citizen, it was your duty to know about the subject in order to contribute constructively, perhaps in a town hall meeting or at least in a civic (civil) conversation with neighbors.
Today nobody acts upon what they learn in big media news, other than to form misinformed opinions fraught with bias, to vote only every few years for a bad binary choice in rigged elections fielding untrustworthy candidates who pretend to address problems but actually perpetuate them via myopic self-interested gangsterism.
Pop news is 99% clickbait and 1% fact.
But this is just my relatively uninformed opinion based on casual observation, not any serious study of the issue. Although given that if this were studied and published in a journal it would have likely gone through institutions which are subject to the same system which would be criticized by the research so...how much good could that really do?
I suppose my cynicism towards the people I’m supposed to trust is the primary thing prevents me from having a more fact based view of the world.
How so? Is it not a fact that politicians can't be trusted, and that, as you said, the mainstream media is largely about programming the populace?
"Cynisism" is what people call realism when they want you to stop talking about reality.
To be a bit more concrete, it’s true that politicians and the media are liars, but then to extend that further to education, entertainment, and those who are culturally influential in general can be quite the stretch outside of a few specific data points. And how is it connected? How does this system actually work? It’s so complex it’s almost immeasurable. A critical view of this is necessarily heavily influenced by intuition and emotion IMO since you’re unable to trust a large body of your learned information from that mindset.
Look at things and keep asking: "Who benefits?"
Consumers with poor sense of perspective and poor critical-thinking skills are more easily manipulated by advertisers. Therefore, dumbing down your viewers is in your direct financial interest.
Eventually won't the fact that the news only covers exceptions reverse in on itself when covering a non exception is in itself the exception?
The deregulated "news" industry is primarily motivated by profit, informing the public is secondary. That's why we see a handful of stories on repeat for days - maximizes profit, minimize journalism and education.
A plane crash or terrorist attack is the kind of immediate news story that can dominate a news cycle for a week and that makes sense. But news papers and magazines also devote plenty of coverage to long term, on going problems, such as the coverage devoted to sexual harassment in the past year. And indeed, even when there have been no major terror attacks in several months, there is still always an endless stream of articles discussing the issue and how we might best approach it.
We should expect that our news sources to devote more of their long form, investigative pieces to domestic problems like heart disease and traffic accidents.
For example, after 9/11, 1k more Americans died in car crashes, because they decided not to fly.
I think some misunderstand this book, maybe because there is a tendency to interpret any talk about how the world is improving as blindness about world problems. Or that admitting there have been gains made is the same as saying it's time to take it easy, stop trying to improve.
This is nonsense of course. The point of finding out what has improved is to find out what works, and do more of that. See if you can apply what works in one place to another place, another problem.
Saying 1 in 7 people in the U.S. face hunger every year implies that the same group of people are hungry year after year. While a large portion of the hungry population probably are hungry multiple years, surely not all of them repeat every year.
I think Bill Gates' underlying reasoning is that by giving all college graduates this book, the future generation will be better thinkers and therefore that society will be better than today's. Hopefully, this will lead to a situation where that 1 in 7 number will turn into 1 in 70, and every place in the US will have access to clean water.
It's kind of like that saying "Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime.".
Also, any good is better than no good, if by requiring a person to pursue the maximum good, they would have not had the emotional catalysis for pursuing the good.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/paulroderickgregory/2011/11/20/...
Association of obesity with socioeconomic status: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db50.pdf
"Among women, obesity prevalence increases as income decreases."
Here is what is strange, from a National Geographic article on hunger in the US: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/foodfeatures/hunger/
'It’s the same every month, Dreier says. Bills go unpaid because, when push comes to shove, food wins out. “We have to eat, you know,” she says, only the slightest hint of resignation in her voice. “We can’t starve.”'
But in the very same article: "Chances are good that if you picture what hunger looks like, you don’t summon an image of someone like Christina Dreier: white, married, clothed, and housed, even a bit overweight."
A bit overweight. That is not what starvation looks like. That is not what hunger looks like.
We can talk all day about strategies for strengthening the social safety net, but it is simply not true that people are going hungry in the United States.
Also, its not lets. Someone else is buying this book, not us. Their money does not belong to us. So we do not have the right to claim credit for this charitable deed. You especially, in opposition to this charitable deed, do not have any claim to it.
https://stackshare.io/stackups/gitlab-vs-github-vs-bitbucket
Gitlab seems to be picking up the pace and gaining mindshare among developers.
Freelancers I'm curious, would you switch and lose your repos' stars, PRs, fork counts? Those are actually a good marketing tool for potential customers since they see you are legitimate.
If one believes that all human life is equally valuable, even when still in the womb, then our world has become drastically worse. Worldwide, the population of America is aborted every 6 years, or one WW2 every year.
Or, consider Iceland's recent achievement in eradicating Down's syndrome, by killing all babies with Down's syndrome.
Our world has dramatically improved in certain aspects of livelihood, but has dramatically worsened in our respect for human life. Proof of this statement is the average reader's inability to comprehend what I've just written.
This statement is ridiculous without providing some sort of evidence to support your assertion that the average reader is unable to comprehend your statement. I might guess that we are to assume that a low score for your comment is such evidence, but the arrogance of such a position is so astounding that I'm inclined to give you the benefit of the doubt and say you just left off any support for your assertion at all rather than assuming you're the sort of person who would nonironically proclaim that "Nobody understands my genius because I am so deep!"
http://newsfeed.time.com/2013/03/25/more-people-have-cell-ph...