Big Number Bogosity : Good Math, Bad Math
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That’s because, as usual, we really suck at understanding big numbers and scale. 800 sounds
like a lot. The idea that there are nearly sixteen million college students is just
not something that we understand on an intuitive level. The idea that nearly a thousand
deaths could be a tiny drop in the bucket – that it really amounts to just one death
per 100,000 students per year – it just doesn’t make sense to us. A number like 800 is,
just barely, intuitively meaningful to us. One million isn’t. Fifteen million isn’t. And a ratio with a
number that we can’t really grasp intuitively on the bottom? That’s not going to be meaningful
either.