Exponential growth bias: The numerical error behind Covid-19 ( Archived) (14)

A simple mathematical mistake may explain why many people underestimate the dangers of coronavirus, shunning social distancing, masks and hand-washing.


Imagine you are offered a deal with your bank, where your money doubles every three days. If you invest just $1 today, roughly how long will it take for you to become a millionaire?

Would it be a year? Six months? 100 days?

The precise answer is 60 days from your initial investment, when your balance would be exactly $1,048,576. Within a further 30 days, you’d have earnt more than a billion. And by the end of the year, you’d have more than $1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 – an “undecillion” dollars.

If your estimates were way out, you are not alone. Many people consistently underestimate how fast the value increases – a mistake known as the “exponential growth bias” – and while it may seem abstract, it may have had profound consequences for people’s behaviour this year.

Now do you undestand????

If the car was invented today they would never be allowed on the road. In a year driving kills as many as the pandemic and many more of them children but we dont think of that because we have a life to live.

And a life to live is the point. I'm nervous about all the sensors people are plugging into themselves to monitor their bodily functions 24/7, it's too self-conscious it will lead to hypochondria and eventually a real illness of the mind. There's a burgeoning self-hospitalisation caused by people being too anxious and in-touch with themselves, people becoming blind to perspective over the risks they take everyday. They'll probably get hit by a bus checking their blood pressure for the 999th time that day.

The virus itself seems to be at that perfect level. Just bad enough to trigger the anxiety of the precious but not actually bad enough to blow that world apart: living until 90 although you were never that wise.

According to experts 1948 was the luckiest year to be born a lifetime of getting more for doing less. Living long in spite of your own lack of critical faculty. And this is what we are up against. Elders who never met life's difficulties and deferred all forms of pain onto future generations.

And white kudos is a problem because white makes right in the eyes of Africa. They may take the pandemic as seriously as geriatric westerners because those geriatrics are white. In contrast to the white guilt at home much of the world looks at white skin as a reason to believe you. They have an incredibly outdated view of westerners one where it's still a worthy elite.

And it's an argument against war because cowards survive wars and coward genes proliferated from 1945 onwards. It takes generations of genetic randomness to reset us to people who can sacrifice and face an ordeal. Bravery genes were wiped out and yet we still live in an imperfect world, a world that is not risk-free a world where you can not be insured against any and every eventuality.

How easily people swerve around the facts, if you don't observe social distancing and wearing masks, convid 19 could exponentially spiral out of control, and you will be locked down again.
Thereis no magic pill there is no cure, it's really up to you

Cowards survive wars. That's my explanation for why the west has gone beyond feeble and actually turned quite nasty. Whats happened is a period of being unsustainably insured in a bubble that will burst with a vengeance. Homelessness, poverty and violence are the true cost of the insurance premium. Appeasing the fears of an aging population will most probably result in war civil or otherwise. The only way to avoid these things is to grasp the nettle and not defer.