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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   30743 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 21, 2022

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Yeah, I realise numbers are often used like that, but it still makes me wince at the sheer magnitude of the error. It’s not a mistake that an even vaguely numerate and scientifically informed person should make. It’s like saying “billions of people died in the Second World War”, or thinking a banana would cost $10.

Shakespeare lived around 1200 or something? Maybe 1930? 1600 BC?

Related to this, I'd often heard the fact that the time between Cleopatra and today is shorter than the time between Cleopatra and the building of the pyramids. I found that surprising at first, but then more recently I learned that Cleopatra was a contemporary of Caesar (i.e., she lived around 0 AD). At which point the fact became obvious to me—the pyramids are 5000 years old, Cleopatra lived 2000 years ago, of course 5000 - 2000 > 2000. My confusion came from "ancient Egypt = 5000 years ago, Cleopatra is ancient Egypt, therefore Cleopatra = 5000 years ago". Not sure if this makes me dumber or less dumb.

There's a status danger of looking like a trivia nerd. Instead, people want to be the visionary, big picture person.

I think there are a few competing memes that result in this.

  1. The superficial status risk to looking like a nerd.

  2. Implicit in the above is that, it's all book smarts with no actual smarts to back it up. Ignorant to the process that one has to be book smart first let that be through reading books or experience before one can actually be smart.

  3. The belief that the "big picture" is a thing of its own and not a collage of various smaller pictures.

I would classify all of the above as infohazards. I can only shudder at the amount of things people didn't learn because they fell for any of the above, and the collective loss as a result of that.

The older I get the more wisdom I see in the old Egyptian character for a large number sometimes presented as one million, it was a guy throwing his hands up as if exclaiming how could there even be this many things. That seems to be about where most non math people just stop worrying about numbers.

Same with the Mandarin word for "a big number" being translated as 10,000 (IIRC it literally means 10,000 in Mandarin).

I guess this is what leads to people thinking $500 million dollars is enough to make every American a millionaire.

Or my favorite recently, that charging every American a $1 per Capita head tax would in any way be a revenue raiser instead of a symbolic gesture.

The look on his face as I sketched out how little and narrow a wealth tax on fortunes above $1bn would be necessary to raise that same amount.

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