Jun 08
Why does everyone think they need to talk in “orders of magnitude” just to sound smart?
When you don’t state the ratio and you’re only talking a single “order of magnitude,” it would be much easier and concise to say “about 10 times.”
If you’ve ever read slashdot, you know what I’m talking about.
June 8th, 2006 at 8:41 pm
No doubt some do it to sound smart, but “a single order of magnitude” is much more broad than “about 10 times”. 30 is an order of magnitude bigger than 7, but just about nobody would buy that 30 is about 10 times bigger than 7.
June 8th, 2006 at 9:28 pm
That’s kinda my point. Why be broad when you can be concise. Why not say “about 4 times” in that case?
It’s just a scale and the scale doesn’t mean anything unless you give the value of the first tick. If you don’t give that value, then we are left to guess. We can assume it’s 10, and if it is, AND it’s just one “order” then “about 10 times” works just was well and doesn’t sound pretentious.
Am I missing something here?