My Ode to Hans Rosling

Hans showing me his business card in Palm Springs, California.

TED asked me to contribute a post as part of their annual 31 Days of Ideas series. So I chose to write about Hans Rosling, who I only met a few months before he publicly announced his cancer.

You can read what I wrote here or here it is below:

“I’m not interested in data; I’m interested in people and life”

— Hans Rosling

For a long time, I dreamed of meeting Hans Rosling, a pioneer in human-centric data science (and a sword swallower). But when Hans sat next to me during a dinner in California a few years ago, I didn't even recognize him. I was so accustomed to watching his TED Talks on my computer screen over the years, including my all-time favorite, "The best stats you've ever seen."

While most people see the famed Swedish statistician as a numbers person, Hans understood that numbers were just a tool -- and no substitute for direct human understanding.

My dream to befriend Hans came true over toilet paper and napkins in 2016 when I met him in Palm Springs, California. When he sat down next to me during dinner, I didn’t even recognize him in person as I was so accustomed to watching his TED talks on my computer screen over the years, with my all time favorite being The Best Stat’s You’ve Ever Seen. But really, all of his talk are amazing. After getting over my star struckness, I came to my senses and said, “Hans, I love your work, but people are egregiously mis-using your work to justify the push for a a world where people and company are distancing themselves from humans under the banner of Big Data. And this is making my work really hard as I’m an advocate for integrating thick data and big data.” He looked at me in silence, adjusting his glasses with one hand. I didn’t know what his reaction would be. And then he breathed out loudly and said “I’m not into big data, I’m into big anthropology!” From that point on, I knew that we were going to be buddies.

Like me, Hans expressed annoyance with the widespread application of big data without "thick data," or human insights. "I'm not interested in data," Hans told me during our conversation. "I'm interested in people and life." As an example, he told me about his recent work on containing the Ebola outbreak. He showed me his business card, which read: "Advisor on Ebola Epidemiology to the Republic of Liberia," and he proudly shared the news that the number of infections had dropped, crediting his collaboration with the epidemiologist and immunologist, Dr. Mosoka Fallah. Unlike other health officials, data science companies and NGOs who tried to solve Ebola without the community being affected, Dr. Fallah went into people's homes (always bearing food as a gift) and had conversations. He learned why villagers were following certain public health recommendations and not others, and then he worked together with the community to develop solutions for all.

Hans said that Mosaka’s success with contact tracing and behavioral changes flew in the face of all the top-down solutions proposed by outsiders. Data science companies misguidedly thought they could solve the problem from a dashboard, NGOs cared more about setting up the press relations over the number of Ebola Transmission Units set up and and over-trained academic anthropologists pitched in by writing PDFs for journals. All of these people, he proclaimed, avoided leveraging the deep knowledge of the community. In contrast, Mosaka adopted a bottom-up community approach to implement measures and solution by locals. Hans said that in the offices, their version of “big data” happening through Excel spreadsheets.

This story is emblematic of Hans's belief that data scientists depend on their collaboration with experts on qualitative human insights, a theme that runs through all of his TED Talks. With an enthusiasm that will be recognizable to anyone who’s watched his talks, Hans spent the rest of our dinner giving me a statistics lesson on population growth, even running to grab 10 toilet paper rolls from the bathroom to use as a prop.

Though Hans is no longer with us, his spirit is a click away on TED. I hope his videos will inspire you with the message that statistics is a means to an end -- a route to serving all human beings with dignity and to opening access to things that have been systematically denied to much of the world. But Hans would want us to do more than watch his talks passively; his videos are a call for us to become advocates for the improvement of human life.