Member-only story
The Problem Of Bigly Yuge
Why our inability to understand scale leads us to self-harm
The most public example we’ve had in recent years of grotesque mental retardation is the creature Trump, who is well-known for his complete inability to handle numbers larger than one. In Trumpworld, there is one, then bigly (e.g. more than one) and then yuge (e.g. some number so vast no human being could possibly comprehend it. Perhaps even as big as ten).
US citizens, most of whom pass through the lamentable US education system without ever acquiring the ability to perform even rudimentary mental arithmetic, are famous for using words like billion and gazillion in order to vaguely express quantities larger than one hundred.
The number forty appears frequently in the tribal myths of Judeo-Christianity for the simple reason that the illiterate and innumerate goat-herders of yore used forty in the same way modern US citizens use gazillion: an impossibly large number that no human could ever really comprehend, and certainly more than the number of fingers on both hands.
Clearly, people struggle with numbers.
And this is not surprising because during 99% of our evolutionary history there was no reason for us to be able to handle numbers in any way at all. Our brains have rough-and-ready heuristics for…
