Factfulness Has a Blind Spot: On the Missing Provenance of Judgment Behind the Data

Hans Rosling's Factfulness (2018) established data as the antidote to instinct. By 2021, critics noted that data alone was insufficient — yet offered no alternative. By 2026, AI-generated "doctors" on YouTube had reached, by one independent count, more than a billion views across dozens of languages, targeting elderly audiences with no accountable authorship. This essay identifies a common blind spot across these moments: the absence of provenance of judgment. Statistics aggregate; provenance attributes. Knowing what happened is not the same as knowing which human decided, what they assessed, and what they took responsibility for. As a conceptual extension of the factfulness project, the paper proposes preserving attributable, examinable records of human judgment alongside system outputs in AI-assisted decisions — an approach related to Human Oversight Evidence (HOE). This article is a conceptual essay, not an empirical demonstration that provenance improves decision quality, truthfulness, or regulatory compliance.