Factfulness: Anna Rosling Rönnlund
Asking big questions about the world is easy. How many people live below the poverty line? How many girls go to school? Why is the global population increasing? How much money do you need to live a happy life?
But answering them ‘factfully’ is hard. So hard in fact, that because of our internal biases we get them wrong more often than not.
In their new book Factfulness, the late, great Professor Hans Rosling, together with his son and daughter-in-law Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Rönnlund offer a radical new explanation of why we so often make these mistakes. Anna will reveal the 10 instincts that distort our perspective and outline why when we think about the world, we need to stop considering our feelings and start considering the facts.
When we don't know the answer to something we start guessing, and when we start guessing we do it in pretty systematic ways that usually are incorrect.
Chaired by Ann Mossop, Director of the UNSW Centre for Ideas.
This conversation was in partnership with Auckland Writers Festival, Byron Writers Festival and State Library of Queensland.
Photo credit: Prudence Upton
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Anna Rosling Rönnlund
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Anna Rosling Rönnlund
Anna Rosling Rönnlund
Anna Rosling Rönnlund holds a Master’s Degree in Sociology and a Bachelor’s Degree in Photography.
She founded the Gapminder Foundation in 2005 with Hans Rosling and Ola Rosling to fight devastating ignorance with a fact-based worldview everyone can understand. She designed the user-interface of the famous animating bubble-chart tool called Trendalyzer, used by millions of students across the world, to understand global development trends. The tool was acquired by Google where she worked as a Senior Usability Designer from 2007 to 2010.
At Google, Anna improved search results for public data, developed data exploration tools for public data and made a bubble tool gadget (Motion Chart) in Google Spreadsheets.
In 2010 Anna came back to Gapminder to develop new free teaching material. Anna is now Vice President and Head of Design & User Experience at Gapminder. She also sits in the Gapminder Board. Anna founded Dollar Street, the biggest systematic image bank with representative home documentations based on data. At the moment it has almost 30,000 photos and 10,000 video clips.
