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Scale of the Universe, but societal risks, charity effectiveness, and other hard-to-grasp questions of scale

Quinn McHugh
Quinn McHugh
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I'd love to see someone make a visualization like https://scaleofuniverse.com or this visualization of carbon emissions but for societal risks (e.g. power outages, terrorist attacks, pandemics, nuclear war, etc) or charity effectiveness.

Understanding differences in orders of magnitude is unintuitive for the average person, which results in a number of biases in human perception and thus, societal decision-making. For example: despite what nuclear disasters lead us to believe, nuclear energy is one of the safest forms of energy generation.

Visualizations like Scale of Universe, which utilize the 3rd dimension (via scrolling in and out), seem to be remarkably effective at aiding people's ability to truly comprehend different orders of magnitude and thus, how much one thing (i.e. risk, intervention, etc) compares to another.

Creating visualizations similar to Scale of Universe, but for other kinds of important things, could serve as great tools for changing people's perceptions about the way the world is, especially regarding topics that are unintuitive.