A sense of proportion
Recently I heard a statistic about how many people there are in the UK due to people trafficking. The estimate was about 4000 which in a country of 60 million didn’t seem very significant. The fact that there are so many people who are effectively slaves in the UK is pretty bad but I don’t really want to post about that because for one thing I don’t really know enough about it.
I then thought about the size of the town which I live in, this is about 30 000. since there are 60 million people in the UK that is 1/2000 of the population. This means that if we had our fair share of these people from people trafficking there would be 2 in my town. Although my town has 30 000 people it doesn’t seem all that big. But it does contain a fairly large proportion of the country. But of course there are bigger towns and lots of small towns so when I looked it up it was about the 440th largest town in the country.
Looking at it this way makes the country seem quite a lot smaller. This is really a bit of deception though because 60 million people is a lot of people, the reason it seems smaller is because I have given my brain 2 smaller numbers which multiply to give the number and so individually they are not too big. 100 * 100 * 100 * 60 also gives 1 million but 100 people isn’t very much, I know well over 100 people.
I guess our brains just can’t really understand big numbers like this. They are just number to be represented in different ways. Some ways make our brain perceive the numbers as being bigger than they are while others make them seem smaller.