That’s because human perception exists on a logarithmic scale! It’s called the Weber-Fechner law, and it was one of the first studied psychological phenomena, before psychology as a field was even defined.
Interestingly, our sense of the “bigness” of numbers is also logarithmic. This is why there have to be explicit explanations of the massive difference between a million and a billion - our brains instinctively and erroneously think “eh, it’s like double.”
That’s because human perception exists on a logarithmic scale! It’s called the Weber-Fechner law, and it was one of the first studied psychological phenomena, before psychology as a field was even defined.
Interestingly, our sense of the “bigness” of numbers is also logarithmic. This is why there have to be explicit explanations of the massive difference between a million and a billion - our brains instinctively and erroneously think “eh, it’s like double.”
~edit I can’t type~
“What’s the difference between a million dollars and a billion dollars? About a billion dollars.”
It’s .1% of a billion, that is a rounding error
My favourite way to comprehend it is by time:
A million seconds is 12 days. A billion seconds is 31 years. A trillion seconds is 31,688 years
Or 1 million minutes ago was March 22, 2024.
1 billion minutes ago was the height of the Roman empire.
1 trillion minutes ago is a little bit before (about 100,000 years) the earliest homo erectus fossils we found
That’s amazing, thanks!