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Hard to fathom (lemmy.world)

submitted 9 months ago by Stamets@lemmy.world to c/whitepeopletwitter@sh.itjust.works

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[–] platypus_plumba@lemmy.world 9 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Honestly, is "a thousand times more" too much for people to process?

Seems pretty straight forward.

In some countries "billion" menas a million millions, that one would make more sense to me.

[–] shalafi@lemmy.world 14 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

I'd say 1000x really is too hard to process. We hear the words, millions and billions and sometime trillions thrown around in the modern world. I'd guess most people process "billion" as "a lot more" than a million. Hell, we can hardly relate to 1,000,000 IRL.

It really is hard to get our monkey brains around, didn't evolve to deal with massive numbers.

EDIT: Forgot to add this anecdote.

Read a story where a local elementary teacher had a project for her kids to come up with a million bottle caps. Idea being to show them what a mind-blowing number a million is. Yeah. You could hide several bodies in that pile. It was freaky.

[–] platypus_plumba@lemmy.world 2 points 9 months ago

Well, our brain obviously can't understand 1 million individual items independently at once, that's not how we're wired. But we do understand what 1000 times more means conceptually.

I do understand what I can buy with 1000 dollars. We don't need to see every dollar as a individual entity in our minds to understand 1000 dollars.