I suggest the article is missing a key point. > Of course, our ancient human ancestors didn’t live among billions of people, or incur trillions of dollars of d

I suggest the article is missing a key point. > Of course, our ancient human ancestors didn’t live among billions of people, or incur trillions of dollars of debt. The orders of magnitude in their immediate surroundings were limited to what they could experience firsthand. A square kilometer might have a billion trees. With how many leaves? One person's year might have a billion heartbeats. A pre-industrial farmer might tend a million plants per year. A sack of rice might have a million grains. > It’s not surprising that we can intuitively visualize a 6-inch or 6-mile distance, Asking people how tall a skyscraper is, I get answers like "a mile?". And even for horizontal miles, who is this "we" who can "intuitively visualize" miles - people who drive? > Things that are so far removed from our daily experience [...] are inherently hard to understand, People are regularly innumerate and clueless about things that are part of their daily experience. Far remove is not a necessary condition. Nor is it a sufficient one - experience need not be direct. How often do kids see real horses? Or elephants? Or dinosaurs? So I suggest the article is missing a key point. Large quantities, large differences in scale, are inherent in the universe. It's what makes estimation and approximation possible. People simplify with units, landmarks and anchors, and rules of thumb. With experience and stories. But education, and press, leave people largely innumerate, making almost no effort to teach the needed landmarks. In science, and history, and civics, and finance. The main exceptions being a few units of time, and of currency, which are taught down to K. Think of those little lists in introductory physics. For some measure (eg, Volts), here are a few values. Usually poorly chosen. And never built upon, into a feel for reasonable values. And then we get science folks saying nanometers are unimaginably small. And journalists that a trillion dollars is unimaginably large. Yes, people are largely innumerate. But we collectively make almost no effort to change that. http://bionumbers.hms.harvard.edu/ http://bionumbers.hms.harvard.edu/ started not from the movement to teach introductory biology more quantitatively, but out a graduate student's realization that they had no quantitative feel for their own field. A characterization repeatedly made by physicists about their own doctoral candidates. How many people here recognize a Newton-meter of torque, as being the reopening a 2L soda bottle? So a takeaway shouldn't be researchers doing something novel, to address a new modern problem. But rather their getting around to doing something long known and established, to address a long standing problem. A problem long, pervasively, unnecessarily, and abjectly neglected.