I remember when I was younger and I didn’t understand a difference between $10 million and $100 million, because to me it was just an unfathomably large amount of money. You have to spend some time at that scale before it becomes meaningful.
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The wall street version of "law of large numbers" applies at 10B users, though (due to population being what, 7B?)
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yeah there was some prediction as to how many users they'd have in 2040 or something stupid like that
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I can vehemently confirm this, for a very specific reason: I've interviewed at both Twitter and Facebook. Twitter has two floors of a building in SF, plus satellite locations. Facebook's MPK campus is bigger than the town I used to live in.
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I was utterly unprepared for the titanic difference in scale.
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Scope insensitivity! Have had it best explained (alongside most cognitive biases...) by
@ESYudkowskypic.twitter.com/S8EGTgxUvD
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"Scope insensitivity" perfect, this is the name I was looking for.
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This whole concept is what makes China terrifying.
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Terrifying is the wrong word. But the probability of us keeping up in the long term seems like 0.
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I think I get it. That's like 60 Twitters back when it was a 140 chars max length. But I see what you're saying.
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Here's a fun concept: logarithmic grounding (it's how you develop a feel of scale by maintaining your sense of one scale while seeing / working with others)
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wow you have an idea:people have no idea of scale that is just so original darling !
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Our minds just can't conceive large numbers very well. It's why people will look at a stat like: 99.999% of planes land safely and agree... ...but that would mean one fatal crash per day.
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Echoes the excerpts from Black Swan
@nntaleb . Our brains have been trained on the Gaussian hence inability to understand power laws. Mandelbrotian provide a better framework to understand areas that are scaleable (‘extremistan’).Thanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
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My number one beef with journalists. They regularly list very large numbers with no context. Part of it might be power laws, but I really think it's just that they don't know what divisor to use to understand the number.
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Like there are a handful of numbers you need to know for where I live. 330M = US pop 126M = US households 040M = CA pop 007M = Bay Area pop 000.7M my county pop So $25M means anything from "a lot" to "nothing" based on context. And it's really easy to confuse context.
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So there's quite a bit of research in cognitive psychology about this. And as far as I know, it seems there's a lot of good evidence to support your thesis. However, we are remarkably sensitive to framing effects when dealing with scale.
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