To be fair, it does cut both ways. Yes, the great unwashed innumerate multitude regularly cottons on to some technical term and gleefully proceeds to abuse it. But that's only retaliation for techies bestowing on common words narrower definitions, which they then sometimes seem to expect the rest of the world to adopt --- average, integrate, differentiate, function, set, category, ring, field, series, ball, dimension, complex, ... Also bear in mind that the average(!) citizen's conception of functional rates-of-growth is probably on a par with the apocryphal native tribal enumeration system comprising "one, two, many" --- maybe "constant, linear, outta sight". WFL On 8/14/15, Henry Baker <hbaker1@pipeline.com> wrote:
I thought about this, but it might actually make things worse.
If you ask a random person-on-the-street, I suspect that the only association they have for "quadratic" is the quadratic formula, which has a square root in it.
So now we will get people confusing "quadratic" with "sub-linear".
So even "super-linearly" (or the more pedantic/punditic "supralinearly") might have to suffice.
At 02:04 PM 8/14/2015, meekerdb wrote:
I'm sure that if you write a few letters you can get them to adopt "quadratically", because it sounds just as sciency. In fact you could probably even get them to use "cosmogonically" or "brobdingnagianly" or even "linearly".
Brent
On 8/14/2015 1:46 PM, Henry Baker wrote:
If I hear another TV pundit talk about "exponential" increase in something, when the vast majority of these examples are *polynomial* (usually only quadratic), I'm going to scream.
Today, I heard the following nonsequitur: "Do the math. This {whatever] is increasing exponentially ...".
Well, I did the math, and it was increasing quadratically, at best.
Can we hook an electrode to some lower extremity of each news person/politician to Pavlov them into understanding the true meaning of "exponential" ?
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