I helped someone yesterday in muting the notifications on her phone. After she did it, said to me how dumb she felt. I replied that all of us are dumb in some things and smart in others.
I know this in my head and yet I struggle to know that in my body and in my heart. My dad told me that he has a friend who believes that COVID-19 is just the same as the flu—for me and my dad, it is obvious that COVID-19 is much worse than the flu, for many reasons, but especially because of exponential growth. For the life of me, I can’t figure out how people can’t understand exponential growth. It seems so simple.
But. I pause and realize that I know so much about exponential growth (and by so much, I mean very little in the scheme of things) because of the classes that I took in high school and especially in college. There weren’t many day-to-day experiences that taught me about it, other than stories about how quickly rabbits multiply. Where I really learned about it, I believe, is three-fold: 1) in calculus and 2) in electrical and computer engineering, talking about bits, and 3) in Silicon Valley and tech spaces.
I took calculus in high school and then went on to take multivariable calculus and differential equations in college. We dealt a lot with exponents, integrals, and other components, many of which I can’t recall off the top of my head. But we studied intensely constant rates of change, growing rates of change, and other elements that deal with exponential growth/decay.
I took a few classes in electrical and computer engineering that dealt a lot with computer bits—0’s and 1’s. We had to memorize 2 to various powers: 2^0, 2^1, 2^2, … 2^8, and so on. We played with exponents all the time.
I also learned about exponential growth in Silicon Valley. In building an app, I learned about how companies could grow from very few users to a huge number of users in a short time. If each person brings in two new people, it could grow huge.
Actually, a fourth! In political science, I learned about world population growth and how we keep creating more humans if each family has more than 2 kids, because if the replacement number is larger than the death number, then it keeps growing and can go very big very fast.
I say this because many many many people out there have not had these experiences. It doesn’t mean they are dumb in general, it may mean that they are just dumb in specific areas, as I’m dumb in many other areas—wiring a house, taking care of animals, heart surgery, changing diapers, etc.
I think sometimes I overlook others for not being smart in the thing that I’m smart in, without realizing they haven’t had the same experiences as I did.
