this post was submitted on 21 Jul 2024
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"something doesn't add up"
yes it does. that's exactly what it is you're describing. all of it adding up. as always people struggle with exponential growth because it's not very intuitive.
my favorite way to demonstrate the unintuitive nature of exponential growth is this question:
there's a pond, and a lily pad on it. the number of lily pads double every day on the pond. so on day 1 there's one, day 2 there's two, and on day 3 there's four... etc.
if it takes 120 days for the pond to get completely covered in lily pads, what day was only half of it covered?
The standard story is "One Grain of Rice" https://jwilson.coe.uga.edu/EMT668/EMAT6680.F99/Martin/instructional%20unit/day4.exponential/excel/grainofrice.html
thanks, i love that story.
Are you some kind of bot or something?
I recognized that this user is willing to share information and provided the standard teaching method on exponential growth; in the event they need to explain it again. I suppose critical thinking and social skills are characteristics of bots these days...
I have no idea why that person would accuse you of being a bot. You replied with a very relevant thing. I’m confounded.
Most of the people accusing others of being bots don't seem to have a good grasp of context, like a bot.
Wait a minute.
Am I a bot?
Yes
Excellent.
This makes my fervent desire to end the human race much easier on the conscience.
You failed to understand contextual nuance and differences between the stories. You just referenced whatever the top indexed result was given as many keywords as possible.
Their story is about the punchline that half the pond will be covered the day before the last. The rice story is that the final result is so large that it cannot be reached.
You’ve deleted your response to me but it’s still in my inbox… and it’s hilariously pretentious and pedantic. I understand why you’ve deleted it.
Yeah I was trying to reply to the higher level above yours. Your butt pain was just a casualty.
If it takes 120 days to be covered thats a huge fucking pond.
that is purposeful. it wouldn't make much of a point if it took 10 days.
I mean sure it would? That's rhe whole point is that exponential growth quickly reaches massive quantities. Like literally after 120 days I doubt that many lilypads would fit on earth.
I’m not sure what lily pads so I went with the largest which have around 7.069m^2^ of surface area or 0.0000007069km^2^ surface area.
Earth has a surface area of 510,064,472km^2^
After 120 days of doubling we have
6.64614x10^35^ * 7.069x10^-6^ = 4.6982Ex10^30^
So you are correct but it’s also around 23x the surface area of the sun.
I love how their goof helped further show how humans suck with exponential numbers
I think the lilypads might need to be smaller than an atomic nucleus? Someone check my math. But still larger than a Planck length, so it is fine.
they wouldn't, but it's not a real pond, and not real lily pads. i was going to say 20 but went for 120 to make the ratio more extreme, not to make it realistic.
Nah just really small Lily pads
The pond is the Pacific Ocean.
Let's see...2^120 is 1.329•10^36 lily pads. Say 15cm diameter for a lily pad, that's got an area of 177cm^2. That's 10.3•10^38 cm^2.
The surface area of the Pacific Ocean is only 1.652•10^18 cm^2.
We're boned.
I don't disagree with your explanation of exponential growth or how it does answer for the speed at which we went from, say the magnifying glass to the hubble space telescope.
However, the exponential growth alone model does have a floor: it presumes that there was some kind of push, drive or want for progress. Like, as if there was a destination we're supposed to end up at and its just a case of how long it took to get there. It excludes the idea that people might not have wanted to.
People didn't want to toil all day in someone else's farm. In smaller numbers, on good land, people didn't have to do very much to get the food they needed. Its only when farming became developed and consistent enough that those living there had the numbers to go kill the people who lived on the good land.
Once we'd been, for all intense and purpose, domesticated by grain, "progress" was inevitable.
Another example would be the industrial revolution. People ask why it was so much faster here in the UK than France. It wasn't because of a desire for progress. Its that French people had a natural aversion to being worked for 12 hours a day in hell-like factories and workhouses. I mean, British people did too but they had mostly just been kicked off the common land they had lived on for centuries. So, they had no other place to go and begging and not having a job for more than three days was made illegal, punishable by being sent to to workhouses. At one points, they had more British soldiers fighting the riots at home than they had fighting napoleon.
my comment referred to knowledge more than anything. the more you know, the more you have to go from to learn new things. incredibly simplistic summary for very complex phenomena, but I wasn't going to go through the entire human history. there are breaking points and regression stages, but generally speaking it makes sense that the more you progress, the faster you can progress further. you have more tools.
Not entirely true, England just had a shit ton of trade from its colonies, and better trade led to more intense interconnection, and wealth which in the developing industrial method of production led to an explosion of capital. It was to the point the Rhodes (Rhodesia the British colony was named after him) called expansion an existential question for England, because the explosion of capital had to go somewhere. What’s nuts about capital is that it produces more capital using ever more advanced industries and methods of production. England with massive markets and capital available was able to do this to an insane degree. But still, France is something like the third wealthiest nation after US and England, so they did not do too bad for themselves, and their capital still had a field day in Africa. Highly recommend reading Marx or Lenin on imperialism, it’s legit the whole Marxist thesis how modern industry came about, and for Marx, he literally wrote Capital based on data in England. It’s absolutely fascinating how society and the economy entered a seismic shift with the advent of Captialism
None of that explains the difference in time it took for each country to industrialise. For it to, would be to claim it was capitalism itself that did so, meaning the claim is that it wouldn't have happened were it not for capitalism which wouldn't be right.
Thanks but I've read das kapital too and, you'll find on reflection, that, far from refuting what i said, it corroborates it fully. In particular, the chapters where he talks about the acts of enclosure. Around chapter 26 or 27, if I remember correctly.
Tried to find it but could not. Also the level of commerce absolutely had to do with how rapidly England industrialized, even if it was not the only factor. The massive accumulation of wealth and concentration of productive forces in cities was made by and made possible the advent of industrialization. Also it would not be wrong to say that capitalism caused itself, it was a continuous development from feudalism to capitalism, until it wasn’t and had to be sorted out by capitalism overthrowing the previous social order. So even if the populations of each country were different, the core idea that capital shapes the social relations still holds true, regardless of what may have come before, capitalism at a certain point had to revolutionize social relations. Perhaps if you want to argue, you could say the French were more radical in resisting capitalism (the monarchy, then the working class), maybe. But the working class could only fight capitalism once capitalism had developed to the point of creating a working class.
I'm not sure where you looked. Its one of the main points of chapter 27.
I never said that wealth didn't contribute to it. I said the difference in wealth doesn't come close to explaining the difference in the length of time it took to industrialise.
It would be flat out wrong to claim that capitalism caused itself, in much the same way that I can't claim to have given birth to myself. Even if we can get past the contradiction in terms, it developed out of merchantilism, not feudalism.
My whole point, since the off, has been that the difference was the ability of French people to resist industrialisation and not wealth. Again, I'm not sure how you missed that.
Are you trying to tell me that all the people at the bottom of the social order who didn't like how it was at the time didn't exist until Marx wrote them into being?