Fund manager Joon Yun argues that people underestimate exponential growth because we're trained in linear math while the world grows in curves. He uses the chessboard rice-doubling example and Fibonacci sequences to show how recursive processes compound in ways our intuition misses.
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Um, my son, who at the time was 6 years old, was tying his shoes one day— or I was tying his shoes, I should say— and he stops me and says, Daddy, the number 1,000 is a really small number. It's only 50 times 20. What? 20s. 20s. That's a really small number. And I thought about that for a second. When I was, when I was little, I used to think 1,000 was a big number. When I used to hear something happened 1,000 years ago, my mind heard it as, it was like ancient history, right? This is Charlemagne. When I used to think about 1,000 years ago, that seems so remote. But now that I've been around for almost 50 years, I'm rounding up a little bit, I've been around half a century. It went by like a blink. 50 years went by like a blink. So if 50 years is a blink, how many blinks is 1,000 years? 20. 20 blinks. That's all it is. 20 blinks in 1,000 years. In fact, if you go back to the beginning of recorded history, 10,000 years, how many blinks is that? 200. 200 blinks? That's nothing. It makes you realize how small big numbers really are. What's going on here? So our mind tends to underestimate how quickly things grow. This is an old study from the 1950s. And in the study, these scientists asked the audience to estimate what the product of the numbers 1 through 8 is. And when you multiply 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 in that order, people estimated around 500. When they reversed the numbers, guess what happened? 8 times— I'm sorry? Bigger number. Higher number. So 1,000. And the real answer is? Yeah, 40,000. 320. I mean, here we are, we're all trained in math, what's happening here? So the authors concluded the fact that the order matters. I look at this— that thinking, well, it's not just the order that matters, they're both wrong. That's the most interesting part of this whole study. So what's going on here? And this story's been told in many different ways. There's the chessboard problem. If you double the number of grains of rice, you start with 1, by the time you get to 64, it becomes some astronomical number. Our minds can't go— get around How fast things grow. So when things occur through a recursive process like multiplication, things grow really rapidly. In fact, everything in nature occurs through some recursive process. Right. The population of rabbits goes from 2, 4, 8, maybe one dies, you got 7, then 14. It often follows what's called a Fibonacci sequence. Fibonacci is another recursive function, just like multiplication. And therefore, if you open up any science magazine, you don't even have to look at the data. The charts all show a graph. Have you guys opened up any science magazine, any math magazine, any physics magazine? Everything in nature occurs through a curve. Why? Because everything in nature occurs through recursion. There's not a single thing in nature that goes from 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, even though that's how we're trained to do math, right? So we're taught this thing called linear math, and yet nature does its own thing, which is it emerges through recursion. And therefore, you end up with a world like this. We live in a world where everything in nature is a curve. Look around you. Everything in nature is a curve, and all the straight lines are man-made. No one's ever described this. So we live— we've built up this linear world based on linear math, which is a very good math. It's Cartesian math, Sumerian math. And we fit that into a world that is naturally curving.
