State of the world quiz

[red_elk]

where's the quiz?

Turn off the adblocker

 

[Lohrenswald]

fine

8/13

I dunno I think it's kinda rubbish

 

[metatron]

8/13, but I'm pretty sure the question saying there are 2 billions people in Africa is wrong and it's closer to 1 billion.

Yeah, it's like 1.3 and 4.4

But then "feminist" math happened, i guess.
So it rounds to 2 and 3.
Anyway, you have to blindly believe such nonsense, like i did.
Get with the programm.

For the rest, all errors I made were because I was actually more pessimistic, especially when it came to men-women inequalities. Amusing.

Oh you're even worse.
The real problems are faced by women in the patriarchal West, after all.
Respec wamen!

I dunno I think it's kinda rubbish

Not kinda.

 

[ulyssesSgrant]

This quiz is dumb because it asks questions using ill defined and disputed terms. And I'm not just saying that because I got 5/13.


I got 4/13.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

I'm smarter than the average chimp, and equal to the average Hygro. The idea of knowing more than eight out of thirteen off the top of one's head seems...odd...given the specificity of the questions.

It's a flawed quiz regardless. When you ask a statement of fact like "what percentage of the people in x location are "low income"" it becomes necessary to define what "low income" means. Some people in the US would think that $30,000 - $40,000 per year is a low income job. I would guess that not many people in Venezuela would rate that as a low income job.

The question could have listed dollar figure ranges, but in its current form it's a wrong question :/.

 

[The_J]

I think there are somewhat official numbers and classifications for these terms.

7/13. Was mostly pessimistic, and obviously got the population question wrong.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

It's a flawed quiz regardless.

Aren't they all?

However, in terms of the specifics about what percentage are "low income" there's not really anything wrong with that question. Low income is actually a defined term, and that definition doesn't involve a specific number with world-wide applicability. Sure, a family acknowledged as 'wealthy' in Manila can undoubtedly find places where their income would meet the local standard of low income, but the context of locality is part of the term.

 

[Bootstoots]

12/13. Officially 11/13, but of course the quiz was wrong on the continent population. So I scored the same as whoever wrote the quiz.

Wait, never mind. 13/13, and the quiz maker gets 11/13 with possible partial credit.

Surely Hans Rosling himself didn't make this quiz - he would never be this sloppy. It must be some kind of fan work. Right?

Spoiler In which I get all horny :

The black rhinoceros is listed as critically endangered. (link). There is however one subspecies (or species, the classification seems disputed) that is merely vulnerable. It however did not originally make up a large proportion of all black rhinoceroses, nor much of its original range.

Spoiler Comments on what's going well in the world and what's not :

The quiz was obviously slanted in Steven Pinker's direction. I could tell that immediately when it claimed it had been endorsed by Bill Gates and Obama, who are optimists. Then I noticed Hans Rosling's name, also an optimist. The questions started out by asking about the things that are getting better, rather than the things that are going to hell, and they never stopped except for the dumb softball on climate change.

The interesting part of learning about the world is that you find out it's both getting better all the time, and going to hell, at the same time, depending on the issue. There are nuances too, so for instance the "global extreme poverty has halved" claim is only half true: the metrics measuring poverty have not risen in step with inflation in PPP terms, and much of the actual decrease in poverty was simply China's meteoric rise. Outside of China, and adjusting the extreme poverty line properly, the world has still improved steadily but nowhere near as much as claimed/implied by Pinker et al.

Public health measures are in general improving quite well in the developing world, and life expectancy has risen more than expected. Environmental issues are a mixed bag: charismatic animal species have done better than originally feared, the ozone hole is largely fixing itself post-Montreal Protocol, and some local pollution issues (e.g. acid rain and air pollution in places outside enormous booming industrial centers in e.g. China and India) have improved; on the other hand, climate change is an unmitigated disaster, other local pollution/deforestation issues have gotten worse, and there is a whole lot of plastic in the ocean. Electronic tech is continuing to advance, but lately in ways that strengthen its cyberpunk side rather than very much that is positive. Support for liberal democracy worldwide has generally declined and the actual reach of liberal democratic forms of government has weakened slightly since the mid-2000s. Population growth has slowed quite a bit, but UN projections of world population and peak population have recently had to be revised upwards to accommodate the failure of most African countries to have gone through the demographic transition to date.

What I want to see is a quiz that contains a mixed bag of utopia-trends and dystopia-trends, making the quiz-taker accurately spot the difference. On that quiz, this quiz's author would surely be no smarter than a chimp, albeit also no dumber.

edit: Improved first spoiler tag.

 

[Hygro]

Well with both the rhino one and the population one wrong then I have 10/13

The ones I got wrong: I thought more future people would be old, I thought lifespan was 60, and some other population size thing maybe.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

Low income is actually a defined term, and that definition doesn't involve a specific number with world-wide applicability.

A quick search suggests otherwise and that it's often considered in relative terms. To get a 40% vs 60% figure is trivial by shifting a cutoff line, so you'd have to go into the quiz knowing its sources.

 

[Kaitzilla]

The OT forum.
Where the test makers get graded.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

The OT forum.
Where the test makers get graded.

Usually downgraded.

 

[Whomp]

In his book, the quiz answer is Africa is closer to 1 billion so I’m not sure why it is wrong online.

 

[AmazonQueen]

5/13

 

[hobbsyoyo]

10/13 for me

 

[inthesomeday]

10/13. Actually 11/13, because Africa has 1 billion, as many here have pointed out.

That’s a major error imo, very surprising that they could make it. A 5 second google search shows me the 2016 population estimate for Africa was 1.2 billion.

This is a pretty weak quiz for what it’s trying to argue, I mean the poverty thing is already so contentious itself. Beyond that cherry picking such bizarre metrics for progress— like how many people die in natural disasters— is pretty weak. But oh well.

 

[Truthy]

So 4 months after I contacted the quiz people to tell them the continent question was wrong, they told me:

Thanks for alerting us to this very serious error. The issue has now been resolved.

And it looks like they did fix it.

 

[Snerk]

Definitely check out some of the presentations by the late Hans Rosling. Very interesting and educational. Should be on youtube.

 

[caketastydelish]

6/13

 

[Gori the Grey]

4/13

Guess I better start brushing up on global facts.