During my session today, we were talking about imagining different kinds of words. Essentially, every word that can be visualized has some kind of emotional value that is applied by the receiver to bring understanding.
An easy example of this is;
"I saw a car accident on the way to work"
This provides you with some material to build a mental scenario from.
"I saw a terrible car accident on the way to work"
Adding in the adjective "terrible" gives additional material that will likely change the imagined scenario.
Words have meaning.
However, numbers don't, so turning them into words that do have meaning provides context.
At university I had a friend who would turn all numbers into beers he could buy at the university bar, where he spent a lot of his time. This meant that a 40 dollar shirt was 8 beers, a chocolate bar is half a beer.
But, once those numbers get larger, this system of visualization is no longer suitable, as it gets unimaginable as for example, it is hard to imagine 1 million dollars as 200,000 beers. So, other representative fill-ins are necessary.
When government spending comes into play, the numbers are so large that it is almost impossible to comprehend. I previously used the example of the 7 trillion dollars the US spent on Covid response up to about August 2020 as the equivalent of 175,000,000 Tesla 3s, which would replace 65% of all the cars on the road in the US today. Even this is hard to imagine, so I was looking for something else. Essentially, as the numbers get larger, the representation used has to as well. I had a look at the cost of building a cruise ship and the most expensive ever built is The Royal Caribbean Oasis of the Seas, which was 1.4 billion dollars and was built in Turku, Finland.
The US Navy has 43 operational aircraft carriers.
7 trillion dollars buys 5000 of the most expensive cruise ships.
Elon Musk can buy about 140 for himself.
That is a lot of beers at the university bar.
When it comes to visualizing the kinds of numbers we are reading about governments spending, we as individuals have nothing to reference. We are far better at understanding a million dollars than a billion dollars, which is why when a politician misuses a million in funding, there is outrage, while a billion spent (1000x more) by the government goes unnoticed. Or a trillion... a million times more. We can imagine a million because we can imagine for example, buying a house or two, depending on where one lives, but imagining a thousand houses or a million houses is impossible. Remember that - A trillion dollars is the same as a million, million dollar houses. Assuming that there is 5 people on average in each house, that is a city of 5 million people, all living in million dollar houses.
The way we visualize things matters to the way we understand them and this is going to be tempered by our experience. So while in my area a million dollars is a bout three houses worth, in some regions of the world it will be 20 houses worth, others a half a house. What is it for your area? Now imagine a million times more houses.
Because we are unable to visualize these kinds of numbers, it is also hard to make decisions on them or for example, understand the effects that inefficiencies and corruption could have. For example, A 1% skim of a trillion dollars is 10,000 million dollar homes - Or, 1000x 10 million dollar homes.
This is a 10,000,000 dollar home in Oregon on Lake Oswego.
Another from Barrington, Illinois
How are you living?
Who is keeping account of all of these trillions going out globally to make sure that every cent is spent effectively and there is no one person or group skimming percentages here or there, When even 0.1% of a skim will buy 100 such homes. I am not saying that people are buying houses, I am trying to illustrate how the visualization of numbers is important and the numbers we are speaking about daily in the news are impossible to imagine, so we end up "discounting" the value mentally as it creates too much conflict to process. This means that those "playing" with these numbers are able to have a free reign over the usage with very little oversight from those footing the bill, whether it be us now as taxpayers, or our children and grandchildren as future taxpayers - if they are able to get a job.
Inversely, while these massive numbers are unimaginable, they also affect our perception of small numbers too - the kinds of numbers we are dealing with daily. Buying a house or a car is rare, but all of those other figures we spend daily add up to, as do all the little bits of debt - but in relation to the numbers we are reading about, they seem insignificant, even though they are highly significant to us as individuals and will have profound effects on our own wealth and opportunities.
Since we think in pictures and make our decisions on what we think, having a good mental model of our world is important, but we are rarely encouraged to do so, let alone taught the skills. If anything, our own ability to imagine is being degraded by our consumption habits and we are increasingly seeing irrelevant as important, and the important is blind to us, as we can no longer discern which is which and anything that challenges us, is avoided.
Thinking takes energy and our brain is designed to create mental shortcuts to conserve energy, or ignore what is "too difficult" to comprehend. These habits become the way we interact an react with the world and for many of us, our habits aren't conducive to ownership - they are gateways to consumption and debt slavery.
Imagine if we imagined our world differently.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]