A Galaxy You Can Dig: When Human-Scale Intuition Breaks

Author here.

This piece grew out of noticing that humans can physically interact with trillion-scale quantities (grains of sand, dollars, data points) while being unable to intuit them. Mag World is an attempt to reason about systems by order of magnitude rather than precision—using scale as the primary organizing principle.

I’m exploring where this lens helps and where it breaks: wealth, governance, law, and technological lifetimes all behave very differently once you move past human-scale intuition. I’m particularly interested in whether others find this framing clarifying or misleading in domains they work in.