It occurs to me—and this is sort of a nitpick, and sort of a genuine thing I think is worth exploring—that a default of base 10 may not be correct here.
For more granularity, we could try base 2:
1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, etc. day problems.
Base 8 may make more sense in general:
1, 8, 64, 512, 2048, etc.
I’d be very interested to see if a different base produced different results, or mapped better to different people’s preferences.
Converted (very very roughly) to years:
Base 10:
.003 - immediate, .03 - next week, .3 - near future plan, 3 - near-term life plan, 30 - long-term life plan, 300 - far future/descendants, 3000 - interplanetary , 30000 - intergalactic
Base 8:
.003 - immediate, .02 - next week, .16 - next two months, 1.4 - near-term life plan, 5.5 - mid-term life plan, 44 - long-term life plan, 352 - far future/descendants, 2816 - interplanetary, 22548 - intergalactic
The latter seems to me to scale better to (at least current) human lifespan.
It occurs to me—and this is sort of a nitpick, and sort of a genuine thing I think is worth exploring—that a default of base 10 may not be correct here.
For more granularity, we could try base 2:
1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, etc. day problems.
Base 8 may make more sense in general:
1, 8, 64, 512, 2048, etc.
I’d be very interested to see if a different base produced different results, or mapped better to different people’s preferences.
Converted (very very roughly) to years:
Base 10:
.003 - immediate, .03 - next week, .3 - near future plan, 3 - near-term life plan, 30 - long-term life plan, 300 - far future/descendants, 3000 - interplanetary , 30000 - intergalactic
Base 8:
.003 - immediate, .02 - next week, .16 - next two months, 1.4 - near-term life plan, 5.5 - mid-term life plan, 44 - long-term life plan, 352 - far future/descendants, 2816 - interplanetary, 22548 - intergalactic
The latter seems to me to scale better to (at least current) human lifespan.