Somewhere along the line, someone apparently decided that the word "exponential" is a synonym for "big." Things like this annoy the heck out of me:
Making it work would require far more government intrusion into daily lives, with exponential increases in workplace raids and deportations.
That's not an "exponential" increase. That's a "great" increase. Or a "humongous" increase. Or a "major" increase.
Ah, well. Some days I wish for news outlets where the news is not pitched at middle-schoolers. I'm sure I'll find some one day.
Posted by bzbarsky at January 18, 2008 10:27 AM | TrackBackIt's not that exponential of a deal.
Posted by: James Justin Harrell on January 18, 2008 1:35 PMJames, I think you're undervaluing clear communication here. ;)
Might I recommend http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwell46.htm as a good read?
Posted by: Boris on January 18, 2008 1:44 PMAre you sure they aren't talking about actual exponential increases? Most of the extreme "deport them all" measures I've heard suggested would indeed require exponential increases in the number of such raids, per sense 3 of the word as defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary: "3: expressible or approximately expressible by an exponential function; especially : characterized by or being an extremely rapid increase (as in size or extent)" (http://www.merriam-webster.com/cgi-bin/dictionary?va=exponential).
"Exponential increase" can't refer to a one-time increase. Even by the Merriam-Webster definition (which I find suspect, to be honest, though it's how the phrase is often misused colloquially), you need a time-varying component to the whole thing. "Rapid" means that something varies in time, for sure.
Now maybe the article meant that we would have to rapidly ramp up the number of raids or that as time went on we would have to have more and more raids, growing along an exponential curve. But I rather doubt that, to be honest. The former might indeed be part of proposed plans, but it's the absolute growth people are objecting to here, not the rate at which the growth happens. That is, if we quickly decide to have 3 raids a year, no one will care, though the ramp-up might be very fast. The latter seems pretty far-fetched unless the exponential is so slow-growing that it might as well be linear for all practical purposes.
Posted by: Boris on January 18, 2008 4:07 PMTo Boris, excellent article link. To the blog owner, I agree with you.
Posted by: Havvy on January 18, 2008 5:29 PM