People Twitter

5213 readers

2136 users here now

People tweeting stuff. We allow tweets from anyone.

RULES:

Mark NSFW content.
No doxxing people.
Must be a tweet or similar
No bullying or international politcs
Be excellent to each other.

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

SendMeYourTaTas@sh.itjust.works

pelespirit@sh.itjust.works

503

Hard to fathom (lemmy.world)

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

31 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] 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.