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by janimo
2675 days ago
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"Facts can be a powerful weapon against fear, a gloomy worldview, learned helplessness". This is so true. However I also notice a frequent and not so helpful use of such data, namely as a way of countering people's legitimate complains about their current state. It is especially concerning when the positive trends are touted as consequences of certain public policies, even when the correlation is questionable. There are heated online debates between the Bill Gates/Pinker/Factfulness camp and the 'left' on the role of the free market vs a strong state in shaping progress during the past 50 years. How can you avoid any sort of bias creeping in the content of your site? |
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We take a lot of time to ensure that our work is as objective as possible. Our core activity is to present the data on a given topic clearly. Where possible we try to provide a summary of what the academic research says on this topic: why a given change might have happened, why it happened in a certain way, if we know anything about direct causations. However, causation is particularly difficult: especially when there are so many dimensions interacting (e.g. poverty impacts on fertility, child mortality, education, health outcomes, and their knock-on or cyclical impacts) and a range of interacting external factors (policy decisions, trade liberalisation etc.). Unless there is solid research to support an explanation of change, we don't include it, and stick what has changed rather than why.
Maintaining a very objective, somewhat central position is important for our work. We're happy that both people on the right and left use and trust our work: if we can at least first agree on the facts and data, then we are all in a better position to then discuss why given changes have happened. Media Bias Check (https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/our-world-in-data/) puts us very slightly to the left, but we're very happy that 80% of the user responses rate us 'least biased' i.e. straight down the middle.
In terms of dismissing legitimate concerns about the current state: we think it's really important that acknowledging progress in many areas does not translate into an acceptance of the current state of the world. As we write here (https://ourworldindata.org/much-better-awful-can-be-better) although we have seen improvements in many ways, the state of the world is still unacceptable. And in some cases, things are sliding backwards (e.g. https://ourworldindata.org/homelessness-rise-england). We need to do much more. We hope that in providing a historical outlook on how things have changed provides insights and understanding of how we make the world a better place moving forward.