What's your most irrational/obnoxious pet peeve?
What's your most irrational/obnoxious pet peeve?
Something that makes you annoyed as hell when it really shouldn't, or something that makes you feel like a 
for getting annoyed at it.
I'll start with a combination of the two: When people call chiptune music "bitcrunch"
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When people say that one thing is 'exponentially greater' than another thing, when there are only two points to compare.
Also, and, unfortunately, this applies to many, many people and their works, including academic and semi-academic ones, - not defining their terms. In particular, this applies to many philosophers in general, it seems, as well as Marx, Lenin (unless we count them among philosophers), etc.
On that note, if anybody is curious about what cases of that I could point to in works on socialist theory, I can oblige, especially if one would be able to help me by either citing sources of definitions for those terms, or showing how one could decipher what exactly an author meant.I prefer to use orders of magnitude to avoid this probkem
The trick is to use "exponentially greater" when referring to nebulous or generally immeasurable concepts. Since they're impossible to quantify, it allows a term like that to imply a grand difference without really having any real details.
The issue is that something growing exponentially means that it is best approximated by something like f(x) = c_1*e(c_2*(x-x_0))+c_3, or, where appropriate, by something from the class O(ex) in the relevant topological base.
With just two points of comparison, you can claim any sort of growth. You can fit a polynomial growth there, just as you can fit an exponential one, just as you can fit factorial growth there. Saying that there is exponential growth when all we have are just two points is nonsensical if we go by what the relevant expressions mean in math.
I think you're missing the increased utility that describing something as exponential has though. Compounding and increasing with greater intensity isn't really an easy concept to explain. Sure you can't "prove"that something is exponential with just two points of data, but the demonstration of those concepts within one word is highly useful and effective as an intensifier.
Although, the more I work through the term the more I can see why it could be frustrating.
I guess this is the benefit of not studying math lol.