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Comment by unethical_ban | Hacker News Reader

I'm sure there are articles discussing the point, but I wonder why citizen-facing scales don't use more linear representations for things.

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Linear scales usually don't have an intuitive upper limit that people can understand ("is 10000 bad?").

Citizen-facing scales should optimally go from 0 (no concern) to 10 (either world-shattering event or highest value ever observed). Due to the nature of how many natural disasters scale in impact on humans, this will often result in an logarithmic scale.

Excellent point about linear, but sometimes log_10 accelerates pointlessly fast. log_2 might be more reasonable.

As an enthusiastic amateur photographer I'm a big fan of log_2 scales. Photography is full of them, most settings follow it and photographers call them "stops". One stop more is twice the light. People don't even think about logarithmic scales but it's very easy to intuit what going up and down the log_2 scales will result in.

Good scale, I like it.

Because citizens aren't expected to need to know the scale. They are only expected to follow the guidance their governments issue.

I like the response, seems very astute of an observation.

Interpreting this in the worse light possible… in other words, gate keeping.

I think a lot more people could understand and be mature in a lot more things if artificial and archaic barriers weren’t erected. I think not trusting the public is a recipe for an obscure elite ruling class. Sure, not a whole lot of people will get it but at least be open about it.

Then again, maybe there is a benefit to using that particular scale and I’ve been poisoned by my generational ills.

Not trying to be argumentative.

If I hazarded a guess it’s the second reason right?

I was taught logarithmic scales in middle school. If every concept needs to be dumbed down to a pre-middle school level for maximum accessibility (to minimize gatekeeping), you're going to end up with a public who literally can't comprehend the things they're being told because they stopped learning before middle school.

The average comprehension is grade school level

I believe it's a 4th grade level, specifically. I think that's part of the basis for the show Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader.

There's no artificial barriers being errected here by deciding to say "8" instead of writing out 8 zeros.

That's a reason to not use Latin; but when it comes to numbers and scales… I was surprised to discover that other people are themselves often surprised when they learn that a billion is a thousand times larger than a million.

Which is itself a relatively recent standardisation. Up to the '70's, a billion could beat thousand million or million million depending on where you were.

Which standardization? The world is still very much split between the long and short scale (and other systems)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales

Obvious answer: compare 10000000 vs 7. Which is easier to understand?

Because many things are logarithmic in nature. Take for example sound. The decibel scale is logarithmic and it makes perfect sense.

Logarithmic scales are not that exotic. "Damages going in the 6-digits" is a common thing to say and people do understand.

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