Last week I attended an event in Geneva with an interesting premise — could its audience of international data experts prove that they were more familiar with trends in global statistics than a troop of chimpanzees? If you think it’s easy, try answering three simple multiple-choice questions.
This was the launch of Project Rosling, a Swiss Confederation initiative whose “beat the chimpanzees” metric has its origins in the work of the foundation’s family co-founders, Ola, Anna and the late Hans. According to the Roslings, whereas the chimps make completely random choices, there is a pattern to humanity’s collective ignorance — people routinely show a more pessimistic view of the world than the one described by our statistics.