Improving your number sense

What’s a number sense?

In short, it’s how your brain is naturally wired to handle numbers and quantities. Not in a “oh I always hated math at school” way, but more like you can nearly instantly tell how many objects are on an image up to about 4 or soIt’s called ‘subitizing’, you can test yourself here, and about how you can approximate the sizes of larger groups.

Recently, Marianne Bellotti gave a talk at the Software Should Work conference discussing how software engineers can often misjudge situations involving exponential growth, leading to system failures. In short, she recommends slow consideration and systems analysis to overcome these biases. It’s a good talk, you all should check it out! Not right now though, right now we got a blogpost to get through.

Watching the talk got me thinking: wouldn’t it be neat to actually have a better number sense? To just walk the logarithmic scale up and down like a breeze? Is such power available to mere mortals? Or is it only for the savants?

Well, I did, scout’s honor, get Marianne’s intro question about the doubling nanobots correct. Not by calculation, but by guttest. I maintain that I’m not a savant, and that getting a better gut feel for scale itself is possible. It does take quite a bit of effort though, as you’ll see.

The method

TODO: Mention the original scott alexander post that inspired this article It’s at https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/memorize-a-few-basic-numbers-to-have