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this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2023
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That's a really good illustration of scale. The last time i saw a demo like this it used 3D rendered cubes. There's something wonderful about using an actual, physical medium for this.
I love illustrations like this cause at a certain point numbers just don't work for most people. Like yeah everybody knows $3 million is a lot money. But the average person doesn't realize just how gigantic that number actually is in reference to the average person. You bump that up to $150 billion for someone like bezos and it's literally an inconceivably big number. It all just falls under the category of "a lot" until you see stuff like this.
It would be a nice experiment to go out in public and make it into a social experiment.
Maybe have a glass box with Bezos amount of rice in it. Put a table cloth on top of it. Put a reasonable size pile of rice on the cloth lets say a tenth of his actual amount. And then ask people to pick up as many handfuls of rice they think Bezos has compared to the single $100k piece of rice. Then show them how utterly wrong they were.
All sizes in this video are easily comprehensible. I can grasp a grain of rice. I can grasp a couple and a portion I would eat. A portion my whole family would have for dinner and then a portion a restaurant might use in a busy hour.
With the cube videos it's mostly "This is a cube of 1m³." Which is already hard to encounter IRL and have a good concept of. But then it becomes "now all cubes cover the area of Manhattan higher than the Burj Khalifa". Yeah, those are sizes we know but that are astounding precisely because we cannot really grasp their vastness or tallness.