It’s our ethical duty to understand large numbers. “Our world is increasingly moving towards extreme values: Damages from climate change, deaths due to genocide, wealth that knows no bounds. We can’t tackle them if we can’t wrap our heads around [them].”
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Comments 3
A thing which both makes dealing with other than very small integers possible at all for people, but also hurts our ability to understand them I think, is the notation we use, where the number of digits (the physical size of the representation of a nimber when we write it down) is logarithmic in the size of the number. So a billion is only three digits more than a million and a trillion is only three digits more than a billion, and so on. You can write down and easily manipulate numbers which nevertheless are inconceivably large.
Wow this was so great. I particularly liked the visualization of 1 thousand to 1 billion, and the prompt to guess where on that line one million fits. I thought I was being clever with my placement but I was actually blown away by the answer!
I saw a comment on social media that said something like "a billion minus a million is a billion". It's like taking $1 out of $1000...you still basically have $1000.
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