Fooled by Our Linear Minds
My graduation day is coming up, and until now, I didn’t know how much I had grown as a person.
We are so bad at understanding exponential growth.
For instance, imagine a water lily on a lake that can give birth to a baby daily. Let’s pretend the newborns can do the same right away. So each new plant will produce another one the next day.
We know that after 30 days, there is no more room in the lake, which means all water lilies will die from lack of space. How many days do you think it will take for the water lilies to cover half the lake?
It’s not 15 or 20 buts 29.
The forest ranger would have to be very reactive to avoid the tragedy. Indeed, at the end of the 24th day, 97% of the lake surface was still available.
But let’s admit he decided to act on the 27th day.
The man chose to quadruple the lake’s surface to have some respite until he could find another solution. Workers arrive the next day and managed to dig and fill…
