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this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2024
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Alright, no offense, but that has to be the least useful visualization of a billion I've ever come across. I already have to do the math every time I want to calculate how many minutes there are in a day and you want to use the number of seconds in 32 years as a reference?
"If you put it all in one dollar bills it would weigh ten tons". There. Fixed. You immediately picture it now.
In pound coins it'd be 8750 tons, which is not quite as intuitive, but it's a lot heavier, so it still has an impact, I suppose. That's about as heavy as a small battleship, if that helps.
I think the seconds analogy hits harder. Especially comparing 1 million to 1 billion (11.6 days vs. 32 years).
Your 10 tons doesn't do much for me. A few F250s? A dump truck or two? Maybe do the comparison to a million idk.
But your comment came off pretty arrogant and condescending ("There. Fixed it. You immediately picture it now." Not really man.)
Regardless the way people picture and grasp large numbers is certainly Subjective. The seconds analogy hits harder for me.
I always think the difference between a million and a billion the same as a decent vacation and a literal generation.
3 Cybertrucks
Well, that's ten metric tons, so by way of removing three zeroes a million is ten kilos. The metric system wins again.
It also helps a lot in grasping why billions are a deceiving quantity, because increasing orders of magnitude gets weird. It's just that the other units are a bit small so they paint a worse picture.
But still, how in the world does one not have an intuition for ten tons but goes to a specific pickup truck as a more relatable quantity? Is this why Americans keep measuring things in cups and football fields? I mean, if seconds work better for you that's great, but... F250s? Seriously?
What’s your mental picture of 10 tons?
And how in the world does someone not have an intuition for time? How do you get to your apparently very heavy duty job on time?
It's not an intuition for time, it's an intuition for a cumulative quantity over time that's the problem. I know 32 years is a lot. I don't know if a thing a second for 32 years is a lot. If you gave me a thing a second for seven years or a bunch of stuff now I would need to whip out a calculator to figure out if it's a good deal.
As for tons, well, you get that a ton is heavy, A car is a ton-ish, you probably know that. And one order of magnitude is still intuitive. Ten tons is ten of a heavy thing. You see ten ton things that say "ten tons" on them in real life. Trucks, cranes, that type of stuff. And it's an absolute quantity, not a flow, so... you know, ten tons. If you use kilos like a normal person you also know how many of you ten tons is, because you know a 100 kilo person is a heavy person and you know how far from that you are. Again, the wonders of the metric system. I can tell you ten big people or twenty small people are a ton, so a hundred big people or two hundred small people are ten tons. I know what that looks like.
Anyway, at this point this conversation is fascinating mostly because it's showing me that losing the scale intuition from the metric system makes you intuitively parse things in Ford pickups, and that's more interesting than any of the possible ways to make people figure out the difference between a single digit multiplier and orders of magnitude.
“I don’t know if a thing a second is a lot”
So you’re just an idiot who has no grasp of how time works and your coping by saying “metric system”
There’s no metric time system. Everyone in the west uses the same clock. If I give you a brick every second of the day from sunrise until night, will you have a lot of bricks or just a few? That’s all you need to know for this analogy to work.
And regardless of if you use the metric or American system, most people don’t have a good grasp of the weight of big things. You don’t either. You say a car is about 1 ton, the average car is closer to 2 metric tons. Now your mental picture is only half accurate.
Your crane example is even more hilarious. Cranes are rated by how much they can lift, not how much they themselves weigh. A 10 ton crane , by necessity of how gravity works, weighs a lot more than 10 tons, but it can lift a stack of steel beams that weighs 10 tons. Also, how many cranes do you see every day that are rated for 10 tons? Do you work on large construction projects?
As for the groups of people, let’s play that out. I’ll just agree that I know what a group of roughly one hundred people looks like because this reply is already getting long. Now if I show you a group of pallets that are stacked with money that is the same mass as the group of people, how much money is that, how big are the stacks of cash? Do you know what 1 ton of cash looks like? Let alone 10?
You gonna sit here with a straight face and say you can visualize 10 tons of bills?
What, you don't have so much money that weighing it makes more sense than counting it?
This guy used rice to visualize the difference between one million and one billion and I thought it was pretty effective.
https://youtu.be/qSOVBiEotaw?si=ATNi9Zb0po0MFReW
Volumetric comparisons end up grossly underrepresenting how much a billion really is. Human brain doesn’t really grasp the magnitude of a difference between a cubic centimeter and a cubic meter.
What we can immediately grasp is a difference between walking across a small parking lot and driving for a bloody hour.
https://youtu.be/8YUWDrLazCg?si=UqzHGGLA6HEQK9Ja
The fun part about that one is that Bezos himself is now reported at about one third more than reported in that video, so... that pile is too small now.
But also, if you're gonna use visual aids that's cheating.
If anyone ever wanted evidence that humans are too stupid to survive 1000 more years, they should read your comments.
Yeah, I think I'm exposing your stupidy pretty effectively, right? I'm killing it with the visualizations today.
"hey I agree with your point entirely but you're fucking stupid. This other completely subjective way of saying your point is infinitely better even though it's incredibly easy to find issues with! I'm way better at communicating than you, despite the fact that it takes two seconds to find and point out the flaws in my communication"
"I agree with your point entirely but you're fucking stupid" is the best thing anybody has ever said to me. I'm making that into a t-shirt. A bumper sticker. I'm screenshotting that and using it as a wallpaper on my phone.
You think it's the best thing anyone ever said because you said it to him, dumbarse.
No, the line is good. His weird strawman thing is irrelevant otherwise, it's just such a great line.
Nice to see they'll live rent free in your head, while nobody here will remember you in a few days.
Pick your battle, my dude. You're expending a lot of energy getting in slap fights over something neither you nor anyone commenting truly cares about.
Do people remember me now? You're making me self conscious now. You are absolutely right that I don't care, though.
insert dril tweet here
I simply picture a typical ten-ton object that has a similar density to dollar bills (just pick one among the many that you likely have nearby) and then imagine that it is itself made of dollar bills, and voila: An intuitive understanding of the nature of wealth.
No individual should have a... um... typical ten ton object made up of dollar bills, I guess. That seems like too many dollar bills.
Wait, I wrote "one dollar bills"? Sorry, ten tons is in hundred dollar bills.
In one dollar bills it's a thousand tons, which has the same problem as the coins. Harder to visualize. I could update it, but at this point the correction is more interesting anyway.
It's telling that nobody immediately noticed. Brains are squishy and don't like counting too high. Or too small. The giveaway here should have been "wait, a coin is 875 times heavier than a bank note?"
And yet, not even I noticed, and I looked it up in the first place. Dumb squishy brains
Squishy indeed. Big numbers are hard.
"I'm so smrt I can vishulize money, ur 'long time' metafur is so dum I'm unable to even think bout it"
Imagine being so bent out of shape by an easily-grasped metaphor you go out of your way to tell the person they're an idiot and make up a less-easily visualized metaphor to prove how easy it is. It's literally "this is a long time, you have experienced time and know 32 years is a lot" vs "you need to know the general weight of a bill/stack of bills in order to know how many would be required for a certain tonnage"
I am super bent out of shape here. In pretzels, I am. There was a shape, and now there's none. I am shapeless.
You though? A beacon of composure. Keep at it, you're doing great.
Everyone knows it would be 1 billion pounds or 500,000 tons. /s
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