Problems of scale: How to get a better grasp on numbers?
Inspired by the post about "petty reform" platforms, I noticed a trend, that matched with my own brain musings.
People have an inherent problem with number conceptualization(Poor natural magnitude conception?).
I recall this being a problem as old as time. Things that have helped me grapple with this are things like Fermi Problems and someone who used a grain of rice to represent the scale of wealth discrepancy in the world, using Bill Gates or Elon Musk as an example (can't find the original video, all the derivatives have been turned into TikTok-esque drivel).
I ask the people of Tildes, what types of scale descriptors, demonstrations, etc. have you found moving in your life? Really putting something into perspective. I will give bonus points for "positive" examples, not just doom and gloom, but welcome anything that tickles your fancy.
A million seconds is about a week and a half. A billion seconds is about 31 and a half years.
I've thought a bit about this from time to time. It's interesting to me. Humans struggle with non-linearity, both in terms of magnitude of scale and magnitude of change (ie exponential change being difficult to naturally intuit).
I think one of the driving factors of this is the way that most of us are initially taught numbers. We're introduced to larger numbers via an exponential scale (the 10's digits), but have them drawn out in a very linear fashion on a blackboard. We see that the difference between 10 and 100 is just another zero, and zero is the smallest number there is. 10 and 1000 is only two zeroes apart. It's understandable that we might mistakenly intuit that larger numbers are closer together than they truly are.
Just to drive the point home. When seeing them on a blackboard for the first time, the difference between 1 and 1,000 is just 3 zeroes. The difference between a 1,000,000 and a 1,000,000,000 is also just 3 zeroes. So, really, how far apart can they be? Right?
It's similar to how we show kids pictures of our solar system with Jupiter and Saturn barely an inch away from each other, and the Earth about half the diameter of the sun, and so forth. It's valuable to have all of that information presented in a clean visual package, so a kid can learn about the planets and Earth's place in the order. But it definitely does skew the perception of just how vastly far apart everything is in reality.