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.
this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2023
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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.
Eat the rich
The rich with rice: 8/10
Thank you for your suggestion.
I'm glad to see that old meme again c:
Nice reference bro.
mash em. compost them. shoot them into space on unrecoverable trajectories... Anything would be better for the future of the species than letting them continue their tyrannical reign of acquisition.
Jeffbezos. Boil him, mash him, stick him in a stew.
Jeff-BAY-zoes
I couldn't decide how to write it out but this is the way.
He would go great with 55 lbs of rice.
Weight the rice instead of counting
For efficiency, yes, for dramatic effect, no.
Weigh a small portion, count it, weigh a bigger portion and weigh to see if the weight/amount ratio stays about the same and then weigh the rest.
I mean, he clearly did. He even provided the final weight.
Lamborghini, California house… How about “I need surgery” or “I want to go to college.” That’s a grain or two of rice, but most people don’t even have one. It’s gross that we worship these people.
Is this a joke I'm too European to understand?
Well yes and no. I assume most (if not all) of Europe has free health care and in most part also free higher education. The joke is how expensive those things actually are, which we wouldn't know because we don't pay for it (at least not directly), but the not joke part is that they actually know how much things cost because that's the sad reality in the US. At least that's what I've read, I don't actually know the intricacies of their health care, I just know some people skip going to the doctor because it's going to cost them a fortune.
That's pretty much it. My retirement plan is the same as my emergency medical procedure plan: die.
Thanks, chatGPT.
You're welcome, chatGPT.
I kind of lose the comparison to the same psychological manhole you get from pure numbers. I wonder if the effect would have been improved by starting with some arbitrarily sized pile of rice for bezos money and then trying to divide it downwards (to where you're scraping the side of a single grain with an exacto for some dust, or looking through a microscope)
Kind of like a "and then there's you" effect
My favorite of this type of video was years ago Reckful explaining 1 billion dollars https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0J6BQDKiYyM
I have a feeling this was "inspired" by that original video. Uses the same $100,000 increments + the example of how little you would notice buying a Lamborghini
Nice!
I was thinking halfway through, "man I'm good if you just want to weigh it..." but the counting out time lapse did add something.
The one with rice I like was for exponential increases in size. Story: guy goes to the ruler of the kingdom and gets the ruler to agree to give him 1 grain of rice on the first square chess board, doubling every square so then two on the next, four on the next and so on. Runs the kingdom out of rice before he gets to the end of the chess board.
Another good one for the 1000x scaling is time. People seem to be able to grasp time magnitudes better than money. 1 million seconds is 12 days. 1 billion seconds is 32 years. 1 Trillion seconds is 31,688 years.
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