this post was submitted on 02 Apr 2025
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People can not actually grasp so many people existing. We were never meant to live in such large societies, historically, we only had a tribe that consists of maximum ~150 people.
It has been scientifically proven that we can't hold effective social relations to a larger number of people. The exact limit is not clear afaik, but what this essentially means, in a community of millions, we abstract away groups of people into "the left", "the bourgeoisie", "the poor" which allows our brain to form social relations to these groups of people with the limited capacity it has, essentially treating each group as a single person.
Now of course, this abstraction is entirely inadequate, as each collection of people is always much more diverse than the abstract concept we use to replace them, and they aren't really single individuals, they don't act with a collective mind.
But most people do not understand this. They just work with these abstractions, these groups of people, as if they were real single people, because in some manner, it does work. If the abstraction actually groups correctly, then the ability to reason like this works decently well. But everyone is always wrong about these abstractions. They are always too general. They always fail to consider that there's not a single mind at work.
It's such an easy mistake to make. I see smarter people than Musk do it all the time. The enemy, like always, is missing knowledge, missing humility, missing self-awareness, unreasonable confidence, fear of the unknown/being wrong. All of which Musk falls into.
I don't see any solution but to educate about this whenever possible. To speak to people about it. To raise the education about stuff like this wherever, whenever we can. I'm trying to do my part.
Good ted talk, but it could be boiled down to how many millions is a billion to blow most people's minds. And even if you know it's a 1000 million, our minds just can't grasp that.
Things can always be boiled down. But the more you boil it down, the more previous knowledge you assume people have in common, and it might happen that they don't understand because they didn't have knowledge you assume they had.
Conversely, if you include too much information, not boil it down enough, you lose people by being bored of getting told things they already know.
In any case, it's not an easy balance and I'm just doing my best here to guess which amount of "boiling down" is "just right". But thanks for your comment, I'll take it into consideration.
A million seconds is 12 days. A billion seconds is 31 years. A trillion seconds is 31,688 years.
Try 100 billion.