Popular presentations perpetually provoke practitioners.  Yes, but … .  Harry Feldman’s last point did seem to me addressed by Rosling

·         His conclusion appears to buy into the fallacy that correlation is evidence of causation and draws a trajectory based on that assumption that ignores all other factors, some of which are patently relevant.

Rosling was at pains to point out that data mining and correlations are a spur to thinking about the data, so he hinted at far more analysis than was shown.

My BUTS (but thereby admitting Rosling has made me think):

The animation of lifespan and income was introduced with the impression the top right area was somehow ideal.  I fear the display is fractal, and Rosling’s descendant in 2310 will have a similar display where all countries start in the bottom left and migrate mainly up and right.  What he completely avoided was the inequality on the logarithmic income scale, which I suspect has increased over the past two centuries. So his animation tells one – highly selective – story and it would be good to have another animation where the X axis is ratio (taking one country as the income standard).

The discussion of “happiness” as expressed by tweets & twitters struck me as daft or ominous – were they really hinting at other applications for monitoring all traffic on the internet?  But can anyone suggest what the colored disco dots dancing behind the speaker were meant to represent?  My impression from the programme was it was electronic wallpaper not a graphic.

On the general thesis of whether science is hypothesis or data driven, Rosling could have driven over the bridge to Denmark and noted the progression Tycho Brahe, Kepler, Newton as an example of data -> pattern -> inferred law.  History as fractal?  Simon Schama on the BBC this morning said children like to learn history as “one thing happening after another” but he’s just misquoting Alan Bennett, whose schoolboy better described history as “one ……. thing happening after another.”

Allan

 

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