A subskill of numerical-emotional-literacy here that’s maybe worth highlighting is “being comfortable with orders of magnitude.”
One of issues I saw was that even after microcovid came out, some people were hung up on getting the numbers exactly right, like they were trying to have certainty of exactly what was happening to them. When really what was most important was having a rough sense of what order of magnitude of risk they were taking. A thing that’d have saved a lot of cognitive energy is doing a little up-front calculations to get a sense of how risky different types of activities were, and what the range of things they and their roommates did, and then only spending more cognitive cycles when particularly major things happened.
A subskill of numerical-emotional-literacy here that’s maybe worth highlighting is “being comfortable with orders of magnitude.”
One of issues I saw was that even after microcovid came out, some people were hung up on getting the numbers exactly right, like they were trying to have certainty of exactly what was happening to them. When really what was most important was having a rough sense of what order of magnitude of risk they were taking. A thing that’d have saved a lot of cognitive energy is doing a little up-front calculations to get a sense of how risky different types of activities were, and what the range of things they and their roommates did, and then only spending more cognitive cycles when particularly major things happened.