Gregorio Cabral - November 08, 2020
A project to provide access to reference numerical values that help make sense of numbers when consuming content.
When consuming content on a daily basis, I get exposed to many different magnitudes.
For example, I may read an article telling me that Boom Supersonic has released a plane that flights at 2300 km/h.
Here, since I know that commercial airplanes have a cruise speed of around 900km/h, I can tell “wow! that will make long distance flights take half the time”. Then I get more interested in the subject, probably hoping understand how they got to make such a significant increase.
But later I might read that the Argentinean bank reserves are at 10B USD or that Tesla will be manufacturing 300k cars in 2021.
There they lost me. Those two magnitudes mean nothing to me. I will probably not even read all of the figures before moving on to the next word.
In many cases, content creators give reference values, so that might keep my attention in the subject. But will most probably have forgotten about these values next time a related magnitude comes up in an article or news I’m reading.
In the cases where I know some reference values, I can make better sense of the content I am consuming. These values help me measure the impact of events, see patterns and abnormalities and make judgements. This is what get me engaged in topics, pushing me to remember new reference values and thus making all these knowledge compound.
I have been pondering with a project that I am calling The Orders of Magnitude Project. It would consist in collecting, organizing and presenting a curated list of reference numerical values from different areas of knowledge.
Not sure about the details of any of the steps yet, but I’ve been keeping a list of the magnitudes that I would like to feature. Some of them are: years ago (big bang, dinosaurs and human civilization), distances (galaxies, planets and artificial satellites), population (earth, continent, country, city, stadium, plane), surface (country, farm, land, room), CO2 emissions (vehicles, factories, animals), website traffic (big social networks, small e-commerce), calories in food (meals, dishes, treats), company valuations (unicorns, startups, small lifestyle businesses).
By learning a few of these well selected magnitudes for each field, I would be able to create a grid that will slowly get wider with time. The wider the grid of magnitudes that I dominate, the wider the range and depth of information I will be able to understand and appreciate.
It doesn’t work if I have to search for the values in an external device. That delay in the information flow caused by stopping to perform searches breaks the train of thought and engagement with the content at hand. Instead, having a “Fluency in Order of Magnitudes” would imply having these reference values to live in my memory, ready to be used without interruption.
Provided that I have well organized data, I am confident I can achieve an acceptable level of retention in memory. I have been using space repetition for years now and I am happy with the result.
Also, I think this would be a good information database to have access to once I can have a Neuralink implanted in my head. That would help with the “presenting” step of the project, since I would just need to make an API that Neuralink will connect to. But until then I would be happy with relying on my old school organic memory.