NYC: Scale & Magnitude
What Happened in New York? - Part 3
This is the 3rd post on the March 25, 2024 session of the IPAK-EDU Director’s Science Webinar featuring the work of Jessica Hockett and Jonathan Engler.
You can find Part 1 here. Part 2 is here, Part 4 is here and Part 5 follows here.
Check the Short Cuts section on the home page for the full clip archive.
Without context, people often tend to use their personal experience as a frame of reference. But when it comes to numbers, this can be tricky.
As an example, consider that Donald Rumsfeld once admitted in a press conference that the Pentagon couldn’t account for some 2.3 trillion dollars. The number is more or less meaningless to the average person because it isn’t within the realm of actual experience. We have a feel for what a dollar is, but not a trillion dollars.
A trillion is a million millions, or a thousand billions. That still feels somewhat meaningless, doesn’t it?
Here is a more accessible way of contextualizing a trillion:
One trillion pennies stacked on top of each other would make a tower about 870,000 miles high—the same distance obtained by going to the moon, back to Earth, then to the moon again.
So if Donald Rumsfeld admitted to ‘losing’ 2.3 trillion pennies, we can imagine a stack of coins over 2 million miles high. That’s pretty insane. And let’s not forget those were dollars, not pennies.
Death statistics can evoke a similar kind of disconnect.
We probably all have a feel for a single death, say a relative or friend. We might even have a feel for several deaths, or even a handful. But when the number rises to the hundreds and thousands or more, it’s probably true that unless you’re something along the lines of a seasoned coroner or veteran of a terrible battle, then this is well outside the realm of experience.
Without a frame of reference, it becomes more likely that we will look to rely on personal experience; and, in the context of death this very often results in an emotional response, which doesn’t help us to really understand magnitude or scale.
What does it really mean for the number of monthly deaths in a city to triple, quadruple, or sextuple?
How does something like that happen?
Here’s the next clip from the webinar:
Over the next several days, we’ll look at more short clips from the full talk. Stay tuned.
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Check out Jessica and Jonathan on Substack, and their work with PANDA.
