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Agreed, but I think this is downstream of a more fundamental problem: almost no one understands how to think about numbers spread over an exponential range.

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Noah Smith

@Noahpinion

Jul 24, 2021

Data visualization tip: Almost no one understands how to read a log scale.

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Nicholas Schiefer

@nschiefer

Despite my best attempts, I still feel like I have only a weak grasp on how to think about e.g., numbers distributed according to a log-normal distribution.

5:51 PM · Jul 24, 2021Twitter Web App

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I think this was one of the hardest things about thinking about COVID risk, microCOVID style. There just aren't that many situations where you're trying to intuitively grasp that two similar-seeming situations have a 3-5 order of magnitude gap in risk.