Good and bad swimming pools – Good and bad comparisons
Ray Poynter
At the intersection of work, fun & discovery (all views are my personal views unless indicated otherwise).
Swimming pools are often used as a comparison to help people understand what a number or concept means. In most cases these comparisons are not helpful because the audience is being asked to compare something they don’t understand (like billions of gallons of water) with something they don't have a good grasp of (like thousands of Olympic-sized swimming pools).
For example, on 13 September 2018 CNNwas trying to explain how much rain might be caused by Hurricane Florence. The meteorologists had told them that over one section of North Carolina there might be 10 trillion gallons of water dumped. However, that number of gallons is meaningless to most people. So, CNN described this as being like 15 million Olympic-sized swimming pools. Given that most people can't envisage 15 million of anything and they mostly don't know how much water is in an Olympic-sized pool. They also said it was enough for 581.4 million showers (I am not sure where they got the 0.4 from). This was also not too helpful, most people do not know how much water is in an ‘average’ shower and they can't envisage 581 million of anything.
But, there are always exceptions, and one great exception to the swimming pool comparison is the conclusion that if you were to gather all the gold that has ever been mined, it would fill between 3 and 4 Olympic-sized pools – as noted by Forbes in November 2010. The point of this comparison is not the specific amount, it is the realisation of how little gold there is around. Ask most people to guess and I am sure they would have said hundreds or thousands of swimming pools – but 3 or 4 (and some have said as few as 2) shows you how rare gold is, and goes some way to helping people understand why it has been used as a store of value for so long.
So, when you need to explain something complex either a) use units that make sense (for example how many inches of water across the entire state would it be in the case of Hurricane Florence) or where the comparison creates shock (for example in the 1990s a USA study found that one medium-sized bag of popcorn had as much saturated fat as three normal meals).
If you want to learn more about using comparisons, join me for my webinar on 6 February 2019.
Happily Employed helping the Rural Community Prosper
4 年Yes people need a frame of reference to understand things and like the debate about government spending atm people need to know what that (selfishly perhaps), what that means for them.?