On Sep 11, 2014, at 8:23 AM, Darren Addy <[email protected]> wrote:
> That's a funny way of looking at it. First of all, almost all change > is incremental, but that doesn't mean it is insignifcant. If reducing > things to percentage increase was a valid way of comparing things, > then someone who went from bench pressing 460 lbs from 360 lbs > shouldn't be any prouder of the accomplishment than someone who went > from 60 lbs to 76 lbs. It's just a funny way to make comparisons, > unless you are trying to purposely minimize accomplishment. I’ll leave aside Mark’s point, I don’t know enough to agree or disagree. But Darren, your notion of percentages as a bad thing is just wrong. Lets say I earn $100 an hour. Then I get a $100 raise, am now earning $200 an hour. You are earning $1000 an hour, and then you also get a $100 raise. So you are at $1100 an hour. We both get an added $100 an hour, but my increase was 100%, yours was only 10%. Don’t you think that percentages better reflect the perceived value in this case? Ask the buyer of a new $20,000 car how important a $2000 discount would be. Ask the buyer of a new $100,000 car how important a $2000 discount would be. There is a long history of trying to use numbers in various forms to represent perceived value of one sort or another. Most systems fall apart because our underlying value systems are not linear and cannot be fairly represented with a simple linear scale. Percentages do a pretty good job capturing some of that underlying non-linearity and I think Mark’s usage helps to provide a valid alternative perspective on this "breaking news”. Log scales can be another useful tool… stan -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
