People have a lot of trouble visualizing big numbers, particularly, the relationship between one big number and another big number.
There is a YouTube video that is getting a lot of attention from the Republicans. It does a good job demonstrating the cognitive challenge people experience. Take a look it is about a minute and a half.
Obama Budget Cuts Visualization
I love the way this video illustrates that the comparison of “$100 million to $3.5 trillion” generally gets reduced by us humans to “a big pile of money to a bigger pile of money”. When the video lays out how small 100 million is to 3.5 trillion, at least for me, I was shocked (even though I am well aware that a trillion is significantly larger than a million).
Here is another good visualization along the same lines:
Obama Health Reform and Wait Times Visualization (In Lego!)
While I may not agree with the conclusions that narrator is making, he has created exceptionally effective visualizations.
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Category and Tags
This post filed in the following categories:
- Best of Simple Complexity - The best posts of Simple Complexity as judged by the post authors.
- Decision Making - Decision making can be regarded as an outcome of mental processes (cognitive process) leading to the selection of a course of action among several alternatives.
- Statistics - Statistics is a mathematical science pertaining to the collection, analysis, interpretation or explanation, and presentation of data.
- Visualization - Visualization is any technique for creating images, diagrams, or animations to communicate a message.
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now that its done i wonder if its good enough to join the list !"
He did one small mistake, unfortunately everyone does mistakes."