📺 Understanding Exponential Growth
Here are a few more videos that do a great job with explaining the nature of exponential growth and how to use this understanding to make sense of what’s going on with the COVID-19.
The first just goes over the basics of exponential growth and why it is so hard for us to wrap our heads around it.
The second has a bit more math in it, but even if you don’t follow all of the math you can still get a good sense of what matters here.
The third focuses on the very important question of how to tell when we are actually beating the virus, which IS happening in many places in the world.
I watched the first video and felt like the lilypad example was a really good one to visualize what exponential growth looks like. I also liked the connection COVID. I saw something interesting about epidemics the other way in which after the 60th case of an illness, there is concern for rapid exponential growth and is typically the starting point of when the outbreak gets out of control.
I definitely agree that exponential growth is hard for our human brains to understand because of how crazily fast it is. This is also very dangerous because people who are susceptible to exponential growth bias are most likely to be less concerned about the spread of COVID and taking precautions seriously. Additionally, I feel that another example that proves many people lack the understanding of exponential growth is often seen when people take out loans, later realizing that the interest rate they accepted is unfavorable.
After watching these 3 videos i understand what exponential growth is. I liked the example in the first video with the lily pads. whilst extremely simple it helped me understand it with ease.