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Comment by tokenadult | Hacker News Reader

"In related news, almost four-fifths of Americans don't know that a trillion is a million million, and most think it's less than that. Is it any wonder why we're having so much trouble with national budget debates?"

No wonder at all. Especially if people think money from the government is free money.

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This is more of a hrair problem. Most people have never knowingly encountered a million of anything at once (though of course everyone unknowingly encounters far more atoms than that all the time), but they can extrapolate that far. Taking a million of a million of something just requires a bit more extrapolation than someone not used to working with numbers can do automatically.

People do usually understand these things when put in terms of things they have encountered. Say that a million seconds is about 11.5 days, that a billion seconds is about 31.7 years, and that a trillion seconds is about 31.7 milennia. Most people will at least see the first distinction, and at least have some notion of the second.

Maybe news outlets ought to list numbers in scientific notation a la 1e6 instead of million and 1e12 instead of a trillion. That way you can just add the exponents without all that pesky multiplication and division.

But we'll need to change the name to something different from "scientific notation." It sounds way too sciency to be palatable. My money is on EZ-Numero.

I don't know if that would really help. The problem with numbers above "million" is that people tend to think that a billion is a few million. Changing to a notation where the exponents are just numbers won't help. They know what 12 and 6 are, so E12 is like, twice as big as E6.

I think the solution is to go Carl Sagan: start saying "million million" instead of trillion.

I wonder if the other fifth is just British expats who still think a trillion is a million cubed.

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