Understanding large values: It's our ethical duty

Happy Wednesday! I hope you're having a chill week. Do you find this newsletter delightful or thought-provoking? Share it with like-minded friends!

💙 Amanda

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Here's a line from 1,000 to 1 billion. It's a linear scale. Where on this line would you place 1 million?

Have a guess? A 2013 study asked this of nearly 500 people. Roughly half got it wrong. Honestly, I'm surprised it wasn't higher. Here's where 1 million falls on that line:

Most of us are terrible at understanding large values. Yet, we encounter these magnitudes frequently in the news: ChatGPT now has 1 billion users; America's national debt is over $39 trillion; Taylor Swift's net worth recently topped $2 billion; and briefly, Elon Musk became the world's first trillionaire.

These numbers are so big they're effectively meaningless. Very few of us have real experience with values in the millions, billions or trillions. (If you are an exception, please become a paid subscriber!) We lack an innate understanding of them.

Day-to-day, we deal with small numbers. We're good at small. Picture three rocks in your head. Easy! Now picture 100 rocks... Not so easy. Now a million? Impossible.

But we can't continue to suck at this. Our world is increasingly moving towards extreme values: Damages from climate change, deaths due to genocide, wealth that knows no bounds. And we can't tackle them if we can't wrap our heads around the numbers.

Luckily, a bit of perspective can help.

CONVERT IT

What time is that number? Let's convert these big values into something we understand better: Time. I think this is one of the clearest ways to understand the extreme differences between million, billion and trillion. Here's what each looks like in seconds.

Seconds	Day/year	Roughly
1 million	11.6 days	A vacation
1 billion	31.7 years	A career
1 trillion	31,700 years	Longer than human civilization

What time are dinosaurs? This 24-hour clock compresses the entire history of Earth into a single day. Dinosaurs appear about an hour before humans. And humans don't show up until seconds before midnight.

How far is that number? Another way to grasp large values is to convert them to distances. I don't find this as effective as time, but maybe it works for you! (I'm probably too time stressed). Here's what they look like in millimetres.

Millimetres	Kilometres	Roughly
1 million	1	Down the street
1 billion	1,000	Across France
1 trillion	1,000,000	Around the world 25 times

VISUALIZE IT

Incomprehensible wealth. Mona Chalabi's illustrated piece for the New York Times translates Bezos' bucks into creative comparisons, from cake slices to temperature.

Zoom out to infinity. This 1977 video is a classic. A single, slow zoom takes you from a picnic to the edge of the universe.

PERSONALIZE IT

What's it to you? This piece from the Washington Post personalizes purchases by the ultra-wealthy by comparing them to your own net worth. (It's a few years old, but still useful).

To them, it's trivial. A few days ago, comedian Katherine Ryan popped up on my socials. She tried to put Taylor Swift's $26 million wedding donation into terms an average person might understand — a more normal net worth. It was a great idea, but her math was off. The correct numbers are here:

Net worth	Donation
$2.2 billion	$26 million
$50,000	$590

EXPERIENCE IT

Real-time trillionaire. Watch as Elon Musk's net worth tracks up and down. I had the page open for less than 10 seconds and he'd already made $80,000.

Just a yacht or two. Modelled on Bill Gates' wealth, this game asks you to spend a virtual fortune. Extravagant purchases — yachts, an NBA team — don't even make a dent.

Keep scrolling... Finally, experience large numbers as a horizontal scroll. With this one, you'll feel the difference.

Do those incomprehensible sums feel a little less incomprehensible now? I hope so. Because our numbness to large numbers can affect how we address large-scale problems.

In a famous study from the '90s, researchers asked people how much they would pay to save 2,000 birds from drowning in an oil spill. Then they asked how much they'd pay to prevent 20,000 birds from drowning. And 200,000? Logically, the amounts should have scaled up. But they didn't. On average, people offered to pay roughly the same amount — $80, $78 and $88 — no matter how many birds were at stake.

This is a cognitive bias called scope insensitivity: Failing to adjust our valuation of a problem in proportion to its magnitude. And it happens with human lives, too.

Once a quantity gets big enough, it just becomes "a lot". "A lot" feels the same whether it's "a lot" times a hundred or "a lot" times a million. Our heads do this naturally, but it's worth working on. You and I might never run into a billion or a trillion anything in our day-to-day, but for us to understand modern problems, we need to cultivate an ability to sense the real difference between them.

HOW THIS WORKS

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But in order for it to stay free, some people simply need to chip in. It's $9/month or $90/year. The model only holds if the people who can pay, do. I hope that's you.

Count me in!

FROM ELSEWHERE

Here's what I found interesting, important or delightful this week:

&, #, @ and ¶ are letters. Promise me you'll watch this video about the origin of common typographic symbols. I had to pause it so many times, just to exclaim: What!? Seriously. Watch it.

We need nitrogen. This gorgeous piece from Reuters explains how fertilizer shortages caused by war in Iran will impact global food prices for some time. (Want more? I explored the data behind national food self-sufficiency. Fertilizer plays a big role!)