Member-only story
Big Numbers Aren’t Working Anymore
For starters, no one is paying attention
In elementary school, we learnt how to count high. Our minds, once content to frolic in the relative safety of one, two, three… were suddenly exposed to astronomically sized integers — millions! billions! — and we felt on top of the world. “Oh, how many ants are there?” — a million!
In today’s world, many of us have developed a fair amount of immunity to large numbers. When I see a figure like $1,000,000, I think “That’s a lot of money”. When confronted with a billion dollars, I think “That’s a lot of money”. It’s not our fault — we aren’t built to understand quantities like that, and the excessive hyperbolism of the Internet hasn’t helped. But there’s a problem now.
The problem
The thing with big numbers is that they’re not all spam. Things like the number of COVID-19 cases, the number of unemployed people worldwide, and the number of people who die of cancer per annum — these are all HUGE numbers. And more than that, they have our rapt attention, because they matter.
These numbers are intended to be shocking — jarring, even. And yet, the BS- inoculated Internet just goes “meh”, and keeps on not washing hands, not wearing masks, and partying. The worst thing is that it’s a self-repeating cycle: people ignore the huge number of cases, people don’t observe proper protocols, people get infected — and the number rises.
These kinds of problems are much harder to solve than others because they aren’t physical. They are embedded in the Internet, and thus in our minds.
