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this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2023
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Asklemmy
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Math (I'm a graduate student). And "exponentially more experienced than the average" means nothing as exponential is a progression, not a comparison between two values.
What this person is trying to say is they are exponentially better at being technically correct.
Exponentially the best kind of correct by an order of magnitude.
Hey now you can't determine orders of magnitude before you know the values
Your statement is cromulent.
Exponentially correct is the worst kind of magnitude
This is one of my biggest pet peeves lol
serious questions then:
What’s a better mathy adjective to describe what OP meant by “exponential”?
Orders of magnitude maybe?
I'd go with "significantly".
A simple "a lot" would do fine. "Orders of magnitude" as someone else suggested would work too.
5sigma from the average person.
My pet peeve with mathy stuff, "something is X times closer/smaller etc than something else"
If A is 1 away, saying B is ten times closer means what exactly? Is B 10 away? 9, 0.1?
I think what most examples are trying to say is that A is ten times the distance to B, but the way it is said if just annoying.
"Ten times closer" is pretty unambiguously 0.1. What starts getting more confusing is "300% further" which is technically 4 but many understand as 3 (try replacing by 50%, 50% further is 1.5 not 0.5). Also "50% closer" being the same as twice closer while 50% further is only 1.5x further can get confusing too, and it gets even worse with "50% slower" - is speed now 1/1.5 (= it takes 50% more time) or 0.5/1 (= speed is reduced by 50%) ?
Most of the time it is pretty easy to know what the winter is trying to imply.
It gets really silly when using big numbers. e.g. a nanometre is 100,000 times smaller than a human hair.