For most of us we use only the numerical literacy necessary to stay employed. And even fewer of us think about numbers in a way where we can see their intrinsic value. We think about a million dollars, in a very loose, abstract way.
Pretty much any number after a thousand becomes mostly symbolic in our heads, rarely representative of the actual value in comparison to anything we could actually measure with our hands.
Source: medium.com
Every moment that passes finds us traveling from the past to the present and into the future, with time always flowing in the same direction. At no point does it ever appear to either stand still or reverse; the “arrow of time” always points forwards for us. But if we look at the laws of physics—from Newton to Einstein, from Maxwell to Bohr, from Dirac to Feynman—they appear to be time-symmetric.
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In a recent paper, economists at the University of Chicago reported that working for a socially responsible company motivated employees to act immorally. In one experiment, people were hired to transcribe images of short German texts and paid 10 percent upfront, with the remaining payment being delivered if they completed the transcriptions, or if they declared the documents too illegible to transcribe. When they were told that, for every job completed or marked illegible, 5 percent of their wages would be donated to Unicef’s educational programs, the instances of cheating rose by 25 percent, compared to where no charitable donation was offered.
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