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Comment by jbbarth | Hacker News Reader

This calculus doesn't make much sense. Multiply any enormous number of people by a few minutes and you'll get hundreds of lives equivalent time.

That's pretty much the kind of fallacy behind "if all people on Earth give 10$ for <cause> we can solve <big problem mankind hadn't solve in a century>."

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It's not a fallacy. We really could solve those big problems. It's better than thinking about the huge problem and your tiny ego. It puts things in perspective. Facebook really wastes the equivalent of 135 lives. That's the reverse operation. It takes the relatively trivial 5 minutes from your life and puts it in global perspective. When you're that big and you annoy people in a systematic way you deserve this characterization.

I don't see the fallacy in it. It's just pointing out that a little time wasting at scale actually has a big impact.

The point is that everything at scale as an impact that looks big when aggregated... if you don't actually look at the scale.

135 out of 1B isn't big at all, it just looks big because of the biases we have when interpreting big numbers. Not mentioning the fact that the aggregation isn't very relevant (it's not like 135 people will have their entire life wasted while the others are not annoyed at all).

If you're one of the 135 people's lives they've wasted... you might take it a bit more personally. :D

But that's his point: Facebook's emails are not wasting anybody's entire life. The 135 number is an aggregate.

Sure, and he's trying to downplay it.

They're wasting 135 people's entire lives worth of time. Every single day. :(

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