Agree that it’s easier to talk about (change)/(time) rather than (time)/(change). As you say, (change)/(time) adds better. And agree that % growth rates are terrible for a bunch of reasons once you are talking about rates >50%.
I’d weakly advocate for “doublings per year:” (i) 1 doubling / year is more like a natural unit, that’s already a pretty high rate of growth, and it’s easier to talk about multiple doublings per year than a fraction of an OOM per year, (ii) there is a word for “doubling” and no word for “increased by an OOM,” (iii) I think the arithmetic is easier.
But people might find factors of 10 so much more intuitive than factors of 2 that OOMs/year is better. I suspect this is increasingly true as you are talking more to policy makers and less to people in ML, but might even be true in ML since people are so used to quoting big numbers in scientific notation.
(I’d probably defend my definitional choice for slow takeoff, but that seems like a different topic.)
Agree that it’s easier to talk about (change)/(time) rather than (time)/(change). As you say, (change)/(time) adds better. And agree that % growth rates are terrible for a bunch of reasons once you are talking about rates >50%.
I’d weakly advocate for “doublings per year:” (i) 1 doubling / year is more like a natural unit, that’s already a pretty high rate of growth, and it’s easier to talk about multiple doublings per year than a fraction of an OOM per year, (ii) there is a word for “doubling” and no word for “increased by an OOM,” (iii) I think the arithmetic is easier.
But people might find factors of 10 so much more intuitive than factors of 2 that OOMs/year is better. I suspect this is increasingly true as you are talking more to policy makers and less to people in ML, but might even be true in ML since people are so used to quoting big numbers in scientific notation.
(I’d probably defend my definitional choice for slow takeoff, but that seems like a different topic.)