How often we see you in our every day lives yet don't really understand the significance of your presence. Numbers have a bit of this duality in life. They're one of the very few fixed constructs that we constantly rely on to tell us the absolute truth every time. Now I know what some of you are thinking - Isn't this supposed to be a tech blog, Jake? What do numbers have anything to do with this? Well, I assure you it has everything to do with technology.
But like most other blogs I've written so far, we need to start from the beginning before we can get to the topical. You see, numbers for all intents and purposes are how we assign a value to things. The idea of tying a value to a symbol is universal and is the great common denominator of all things. Numbers can describe the flight path of a fighter jet, quantify a group of people, estimate the size of far away planets and more. But much like super powers, numbers can be abused.
Numbers are comforting. They can be understood on a basic level by everyone, young and old alike.
Numbers are neutral. They don't show bias - aren't conservative or liberal in nature.
Ultimately, however, context is the glue that ties all numbers to a meaningful existance.
This part of the ride gets a bit bumpy, so hold on tight and we'll get through this together.
There is an inherent problem with numbers. This problem lies in the concept of scale. We can all imagine what 5 of something looks like, right? We can even picture 25 of something to a certain extent. Sometimes even 100 of something. But I imagine that you, like me, start picturing money at around the 100 quantity. I picture 100 of something as a picture of one of those somethings with a big "x100" on it. Just like the 100 dollar bill. But what happens when we get above that? This is where scale starts to skew understanding.
Today, we see numbers all the time tied to political arguments. We hear about spending in the millions and billions. We hear about the national debt being in the trillions. But what does that even mean? Let's take a look at it somewhat visually. For the sake of easy math, let's say the national debt is at a nice round one trillion dollars: that's 1,000,000,000,000. If you're like me, your eyes start to go fuzzy after the first 6 zeros. Take three of those zeroes away (divide by 1000) and you have one billion or 1,000,000,000. Remove three more zeroes and we're left with one million or 1,000,000.
These are all insanely large numbers and we have little comprehension of what that means. So we start to group in varying degrees of "a lot". Pull it back down and we can make it a bit easier by saying 1,000,000 = 1 unit. This means one billion = 1000 units and one trillion = 1,000,000 units. You read that right. One trillion is one million times one million. These large numbers is why we often settle for percentages. Percentages are easier to understand. One hundred thousand is 10% of one million. One million is 10% of 10 million. Get it?
So people all around the world take advantage of this fuzzy understanding of large numbers and use it to sway public opinion. On the flip side of that, though, people use small numbers to represent a much larger whole. Take Family Feud for example, which polls 100 people to get the most popular answers. These questions posed to the 100 people generally are pretty generic so as not to get crazy off the wall outlying answers so this group of 100 answers tends to fall in line pretty well with public opinion. In other words, grab any other random group of 100 people and they'll generally arrive at some consensus.
Now take this 100 people and ask them something that has something to do with a more personal topic such as religion or politics and you'll find that public opinion often doesn't reflect such small numbers. This is why numbers need context. If I ask 5000 people on Fox News whether they like Obama better than they liked Bush, I bet a majority of the answers would say Bush. Ask the same question to MSNBC and you'll find they like Obama better. Notice the context there? The number of people didn't change, but the end result is different because of the bias of the group. Pretty suspect, isn't it?
Travel with me now to the world of electronics. TV's now advertise things like 2M:1 dynamic contrast ratios, 2ms refresh rate and the new big thing is plasmas advertising 600Hz. The dynamic contrast ratio is a large number. You think to yourself that larger is better so you don't even think about how that number was obtained. Same thing with the 600Hz, although not as large a number as the two million, but still large enough to have emotional ties with your wallet. The same holds true for small numbers. The 2ms refresh rate is faster than the 5ms refresh rate, so you go with the better one.
Now I'm not sitting here saying all numbers should be approached with caution, but remember the context around them next time before you jump in head first. Truth in advertising would help quite a bit with restoring my faith in numbers, but that's a far way out yet.
Until then always remember,
It is the Geeks that will inherit the Earth
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