That one is especially egregious because you don’t need any mental math to realize the absurdity of the statement (“the $500 million Bloomberg spent on his failed presidential campaign could have given every American over a million dollars each”). Realizing that statement is absurd just requires a basic sense of how the world works.

As an analogy, imagine someone said that “a cow that weighs 500 million milligrams could give every American more than a kilogram of meat each.” You don’t need to know that 500 million milligrams is 500 kilograms and that this clearly would not be enough to give 300 million Americans a kilo of meat apiece — you just have to have an elementary enough understanding of the world that it’s obvious a single cow cannot feed an entire country.

The analogy falls a little flat because most people can conceptualise a cow easily enough, but most people have zero intuitive concept of how much 500 million dollars is.

I agree that most people probably have zero intuitive concept what $500MM can actually buy in concrete terms (e.g. how many yachts/mansions/political capital/failed presidential campaigns/etc.), but I think they do have the intuition that no individual has enough money to make every single person in the US wealthy.

It falls a little flat because of that, but it should still be a quantity which feels suspicious:

- One person could have enough to give every American $1M without first taking $1M from every American. Did you and everyone you know buy $1,000,000 of Washington Post or Wallstreet Journal subscriptions, for example?

- One person could spend $1M-per-American without anything very interesting or noteworthy happening to the people taking that money in payment.

- One person could spend enough for $1M/American on a Presidential run and lose; did Hillary and Trump and the other candidates also spend that much (WOW!) or did they spend nothing by comparison and still beat Bloomberg? (also wow!).

- One Presidential run could cost so much; $1M/American is a lot more than Americans earn every year and therefore pay in tax every year, and handwaving debt away it's therefore many times more than government annual spending on everything; infrastructure, military, social services, schooling, etc. Suspiciously high.

- A million per American is in the region of 340 Trillion, several times the world's GDP.

"There are 10^11 stars in the galaxy. That used to be a huge number. But it's only a hundred billion. It's less than the national deficit! We used to call them astronomical numbers. Now we should call them economical numbers." - Richard Feynman

> One person could have enough to give every American $1M without first taking $1M from every American. Did you and everyone you know buy $1,000,000 of Washington Post or Wallstreet Journal subscriptions, for example?

Once net worth is that high, the majority of it seems to be attributable to stock market and other similarly intangible $, rather than $ someone has literally directly taken/earned from others. It seems unfair to expect humans to contemplate big numbers (something we're known to be bad at) by also thinking about imaginary $ as though they had a 1-for-1 tangible source.

That being said, you certainly aren't wrong to think of it this way. For example, Bezos' net worth of ~$110B / ~333M Americans = ~$333/American , which sounds like a reasonable ballpark approximation of how much _profit_ the average person has spent on Amazon + Audible + AWS + WaPo.

Thanks for giving examples of logical ways to process large numbers. These are good ways to double-check quick maths.

It always amuses/scares me how much of a separation there is between people who think and people who just parrot others. The people in that video just copied what they saw people commenting on twitter. It’s ok though, they have nice looks and voices and it’s impolite to call them idiots.

It’s how we end up with eggcorns. People just say things without understanding what it is they’re saying.

When your words don’t have to adhere to reality, you can end up saying some ridiculous things, and the other parrots in the room will nod and agree with you.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eggcorn

Early-stage covid was so revealing of this — who actually thinks, versus downloading updates from NPR and CNN.

Interesting 2 choices there.

I'm thankful every day that throughout my education it was drilled into me never to circle my answer at the end of a math problem until I first re-read the problem and asked if my answer made any sense.

I feel for the math teachers out there who receive homework where a sink faucet spews 70.4 gallons of water per second.

> I'm thankful every day that throughout my education it was drilled into me never to circle my answer at the end of a math problem until I first re-read the problem and asked if my answer made any sense.

I had always done this, but I remember hitting a word problem in calculus where the calculation came back with something that made no intuitive sense. I remember staring at it and re-tracing each step before turning it in, certain that I had have made a mistake, but unable to find a problem. It turned out that nothing was wrong, the values just weren't real-world consistent.

One funny incident I had on this topic was when I was TAing calculus one student proudly proclaimed that there's no gravity on Mars while doing velocity problems.

This didn't stop them from using the gravitational constant provided in the assignment or from getting the correct answer even, but it was funny regardless.

This mistake is so interesting to me. Here's a great explanation of what's probably happening: https://youtu.be/6egeUxIEQnM

tl;dr: mentally we take off "millions" as a unit, do the calculation, then add "millions" back on. This works for addition, subtraction, and inequality but fails for multiplication and division.

the fact that this basic math error made it thru so many people and still made it onto the air is very telling - and scary.

The math mistake actually doesn’t surprise me. The lack of critical thinking to say, wait, is that right? Is a complete whiff.