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note 229

The moral significance of scale is an extremely complex issue: 1 dead is a person, 10 dead is a drama, and 1 million dead is a statistic. Even more so when realizing that any killed USA citizen will be considered a much larger tragedy than the killing of dozens of African people for example. Scale also influences knowledge production. James Surowiecki argues that large groups of people have certain ways in which they develop certain knowledge, which can not be generated by small groups of people (Surowiecki 2004). Large data structures in computer science are also studied as special feature in computer science. Scale facilitates certain dynamics that are hardly known yet which are only subject of research in the last decades.