Paul GrahamVerified account

Weird how as society becomes more complex, the disasters have more of a mathematical feel. This pandemic, even more so than the financial crisis, feels totally ephemeral and governed by abstract concepts.

It's not just the "hurr durr exponential growth" thing, it's doing fairly extreme things in the physical world, such as not leaving the house for months, to create a small decrease in a variable in a formula somewhere.

For a while, I thought people accusing media/political types of being innumerate was dumb -- these people obviously understand exponential growth to deal with the stock market etc. But perhaps dealing with ephemeral numerical phenomena is has actually been unique to tech so far.