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My friends and I always talk about how big a social problem scale-blindness is, so this is awesome! Suggestions: 1. Show progress towards some fixed number of
by holmesworcester 5y ago
My friends and I always talk about how big a social problem scale-blindness is, so this is awesome!
Suggestions:
1. Show progress towards some fixed number of questions so you can see your score at the end so you can see how well-calibrated you are and compare with friends.
2. Add other things than weight, so people can get calibrated for other things too. Time. Probability. Money. Risk of death. Deaths (in war or from disease, e.g.). Stuff like that!
3. Have a speed mode where you have to learn to do these calculations really fast, so that you can incorporate this awareness into your day to day life and awareness of things.
4. Have a slow mode where you are trying to get everything right, so that you learn how to proceed when you really want to be sure.
5. Have a mode where nothing is within 100 or 1000 of anything else, so that you're purely focused on scale awareness and so that your ability to estimate on a 10-100 scale doesn't matter so much.
- throwawaylinux 5y agoWhat is scale-blindness and how big a social problem is it?
- LugarOS 5y agoIt is hard for humans to visualize in their heads the difference between 1 billion and 10 billion. Our brains weren't created to think of such massive amounts of objects. I don't think it is too big of a social problem though. It's probably because cavemen had to carry 10 rocks at a time, 15 max. We didn't have to use such large numbers until recently in human history.
- xcambar 5y agoAdditionally, on the other end of the spectrum, small quantities (3-4) of countable items don't need conscious calculations to be counted. Beyond 4, we need to sum the items consciously. Beyond 10 (or so), the error rate on quick quantity calculations is exploding. The brain is just falling back on approximation mode.
- coastflow 5y agoTo build intuition on scaling, the 1997 "Powers of Ten" video is an excellent resource that is still shown in introductory university physics lectures: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0
- last_one_in 5y agoI watched that with my kids a couple of weeks ago. Definitely one of the inspirations. Also been listening to the "What If?" audiobook and Randall Monroe is never afraid to think about things like 80,000 gorillas.