This last year has been a real schooling in exponential processes 🤔
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We should stop using the grains of rice on a chessboard or doubling lily pad examples. To explain exponential growth just cite 2020.
Fine, fine geometric, to be precise.
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Like nothing one day, a rumor the next day, Twitter rumbling the next week, emergency shitshow the week after, then New York collapsing in a month. And all only visible if you trusted statistics. We’ve kinda already normalized how weird that whole thing was the first time.
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It’s easier to believe outlandish but comprehensible lies about Bill Gates and 5G than stretch your mind to accommodate exponentials. What’s happening is so hard to wrap your mind around, it’s easier to be a crackpot.
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We forget the universe has many big, fast processes that we simply don’t encounter very often. We equate large scale with slow, creeping change. We are treble creatures. Frequency domain flatlanders. We don’t expect sudden bass impulses.
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We also have created an unprecedented facade of security in the western world.
People accustomed to wars every ~20 years were not surprised by the sudden change. Acts of God were a thing for the majority of human history
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