Human intuition and numbers

A walkthrough of examples where human intuition cannot seem to keep up with the math!

Scale of money — Image created with rough charts by author

Big numbers

Big numbers are crazy! They’re fascinating! But they are also incredibly hard to get our minds around.

In most people's everyday life, we are using numbers to describe our salary, dinner cost, taxes, the cost of a beer, or maybe the cost of a house. These are all different ranges of numbers, but what they have in common is, that we can internally visualize what other things have roughly the same value.
When numbers get bigger than what we can intuitively imagine something physical with roughly the same worth:

Here are some numbers for you, to illustrate my point (shown in the top chart)

The average income in the UK (2022)
40.699 USD

Elon Musk's current worth (March 2023)
192.300.000.000 USD

US GDP (2022)
20.890.000.000.000 USD

Visually represented can make it easier for some people to reason about the differences in size — Image created with rough charts by author

Distances in space

The guy that invented chess