Re: [tlug] Pedant's corner

["Curt J. Sampson" <cjs@??>]

On 2026-01-25 15:24 +0900 (Sun), Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

> This drives me nuts.  I have no idea what people who say "steep
> learning curve" (derogatory) have pictured in their heads....

Yes, this would be the problem with economists. They have no idea what's
going on inside the heads of normal people. (Hint: when you and a
particular friend have been arrested for the first time, it's not, "how
many times shall we be arrested again together so I can judge whether I
should play the iterated prisoner's dilemma?" Come to think of it, maybe we
could help the discipline by arresting economists more often....)

> The learning curve is a graph, a picture of a function.

Yes, exactly. Though there are many ways (and co-ways!) to picture such a
thing....

> The original learning curve (Ken Arrow, one of my advisors) was unit cost
> versus time. It was quantified in World War II airframe manufacture...

Interesting, since I'd heard that in production contexts it was unit cost
_x_ versus total production _y._ That description gets even more
interesting in that, after I've had a beer or three, I feel as if
production is the _inverse_ of time. (Though admittedly I guess I am
thinking of production _rate,_ rather than cumulative production.)

But then, when I look at that curve, it slopes _downwards,_ does it not?[1]

At any rate, my thesis here, which I propose to bat up, Punch and Judy
style, against your antithesis,[2] is that people are generally quite
one-dimensional and think as such: they look at their forward motion only
as progress. (This makes sense: we can easily look back at how far we've
walked from that tree way back there; it's much more difficult—nay,
impossible—for us to instinctively calculate our potential energy gain from
walking up a hill, and anyway we don't get it all back in usable form when
we trip and fall back down the hill, anyway. In fact, much of the energy
returned we really would rather have not returned, given the choice.)

So our intuitive Cartesian graph is forward progress on the X axis and
effort expended on the Y axis. Yet you economists are insisting that the
steeper the hill we face, the easier it is! I think Thomas Carlyle would
have something to say about this.[5]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Learning_curve_example_from_WWII_production_in_the_US_airframe_industry.jpg
[2]: These will of course lead to a _synthesis,_ cancelling each other out,
     which explains why the communists never got anything done and had a
     non-growth economy.[3]
[3]: I think that is a very good joke about economics.  I think Elon
     Musk, SNL host and brilliant comedian,[4] would agree with me.
[4]: https://youtu.be/EkQUogcOaiU?si=W3q01WhS4dpqtg6P&t=1816
[5]: Once the economists got past Carlyle's "dismal science" quip. I think
     many of them are still at the, "Science? We're a science? Woo!" stage.

cjs
-- 
Curt J. Sampson      <cjs@??>      +81 90 7737 2974

To iterate is human, to recurse divine.
    - L Peter Deutsch