Humans didn’t evolve to understand our world
A few years ago, during the last iteration of this website, I made a little interactive aimed at giving me a sense of an otherwise incomprehensible number: the number of Jewish deaths that occurred during the Holocaust. I started a timer that incremented by one every second, allowing me (and anyone who happened onto the site) to experience the slow accrual of six million seconds and, by extension, the scale of that particular horror.
It is 11:09 a.m. on July 31, 2025 as I write this. If I’d started a similar counter 6 million seconds ago, it would have begun about half an hour after midnight on May 23 of this year. If I started the counter now, it wouldn’t reach 6 million until late on the evening of Oct. 8.
Even put into those terms, it’s hard to grasp. It’s hard to understand how long ago May 23 was, for example. Perhaps it’s more useful to consider 6 million minutes, which would put us back in early March 2014. Or 6 million hours, which stretches back to the year 1341.
Our brains are simply incapable of understanding such large numbers. And for good reason. What need did early man have for the number “one million” — much less “one thousand” or even “one hundred”? For so much of human history, a history that itself extends back an incomprehensible length of time, there was simply no circumstance in which a one followed by six zeroes offered any utility. So there was no evolutionary advantage in being able to immediately grasp what 1 million meant.
Much less 1 billion. The need for humans to conprehend a thousand million is even more recent. It’s generally driven by discussions of money, first in the public and then in the private sector. It wasn’t until 2018 that “billionaire” began to appear more frequently in English-language books than did “millionaire.” And we can see that “trillionaire” — a million millions — is just starting to make its appearance.
To appreciate the scale of a billion, enterprising humans have turned to other representations. This effort to convey the wealth of Jeff Bezos using grains of rice — each representing not $1 but $100,000 — has remained with me.
And that’s when Bezos’s wealth was much more modest than it is today. The current richest man in the world, according to Bloomberg, is Elon Musk, whose net worth is three times what Bezos’s was at the time the video above was made. It’s almost literally incomprehensible.
This problem doesn’t simply apply to numbers, of course. Earlier this week, “Today in Tabs”‘s Rusty Foster theorized (convincingly) about how our evolutionary lack of intellectual sophistication has hobbled our ability to accurately assess the role of “artificial intelligence” systems.
“The essential problem is this: generative language software is very good at producing long and contextually informed strings of language, and humanity has never before experienced coherent language without any cognition driving it,” Foster wrote. “In regular life, we have never been required to distinguish between ‘language’ and ‘thought’ because only thought was capable of producing language, in any but the most trivial sense. The two are so closely welded that even a genius like Alan Turing couldn’t conceive of convincing human language being anything besides a direct proxy for ‘intelligence.’ ”
We can’t understand “one billion.” We also can’t understand that a thing that talks just like a human is just parroting human speech in the way we would understand it if that speech were coming from, say, a parrot. (I remain steadfast in my belief that a great deal of A.I.-centered rumination could be sidestepped if more people read the essay “The Soul of the Mark III Beast.” Amusingly, when I was trying to remember the title of this essay a few weeks ago, I tested an A.I. to see if it could remind me. Instead, it invented a non-existent essay and offered that as its answer.)
None of this is meant to be accusatory. Instead, it’s meant sympathetically — rather necessarily since I am a human who similarly lacks the capacity to immediately understand these things. It’s useful, not embarrassing, to remember that the human mind is clever enough to have invented things that it itself cannot fully comprehend. Man made a rock too big for Man to lift.
There’s a corollary here that I will mention because it has directly impacted my work at various times over the years. In addition to failing to understand scale, we often fail to understand change. For example, I would imagine that most Americans don’t know that the population of the U.S. increased by more than 20 percent just since the year 2000.
If you are 25 years old, in other words, there are now six people for every five that were in the U.S. when you were born. If you are 50, there are now eight people in the U.S. for every five that were here when you were born. So when people (Donald Trump) suggest that there’s some baffling conspiracy behind Joe Biden getting more votes in 2020 than Barack Obama did in 2008, you might remind them that the U.S. population grew by almost 10 percent over those 12 years. That context is important.
It’s important for people to understand our natural limitations. But it’s also important for writers to understand them and to accommodate them. It’s important to convey information about the world in a way that recognizes that this information may be misconstrued.
When we’re talking, for example, about something like the scale of deaths from covid or among children in Gaza, presenting that information as something other than a five- or six-digit number gives readers a more concrete sense of what’s actually happening.