Curious Omission In New-Style Formats

[Antoon Pardon]

Op 15-07-16 om 12:56 schreef Steven D'Aprano:
> On Fri, 15 Jul 2016 06:40 pm, Jussi Piitulainen wrote:
>
>> Antoon Pardon writes:
>>
>>> Op 15-07-16 om 08:06 schreef Marko Rauhamaa:
>>>> Common usage among educated speakers ordinarily is the yardstick for
>>>> language questions.
>>> But educated about what exactly?
>>>
>>> Each time someone talks about "a steep learning curve" in order to
>>> indicate something is difficult to master, he is using it wrong,
>>> because actual steep learning curves indicate something can be
>>> mastered quickly.
> That's not necessarily the case. See below.

I think it does.

>
> "Learning curve" or "experience curve" is not just an metaphor, it is an
> actual technical term. See the Wikipedia article:
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learning_curve

I know and the technical term precedes the metaphor.

> Remember that the English idiom of a steep learning curve is not just hard
> to learn. It means that something takes a lot of effort to gain mastery
> over, after which things become easier.

Yes things/practicing become easier, mastering even further does not.

> Here is a curve that matches the common idiom. It is (1) steep, (2) requires
> a lot of effort for very little progress at the beginning, and (3) becomes
> easier with time:
>
>
> K                       x
> n                      x
> o                     x
> w                   x
> l                 x 
> e              x
> d          x
> g x
> e
> + Effort or cost or time

I think you are making things up now. I have never seen an actual learning
curve with that shape. All learning curves I have seen show the law of
diminishing (marginal) returns.

> Another way to interpret it is to ask, what's the *cost* (in time, or
> effort) to gain a certain amount of knowledge? That's equivalent to
> swapping the X and Y axes:

Which you don't expect because if swapping axes was common, most people
would understand that talking about steep or shallow curves would be
meaningless since you wouldn't know whether is was steep with standaard
ax positions or steep with swapped ax posititions.

>
> C            x
> o       x
> s    x
> t
> ·  x
> o
> r
> ·
> t x
> i
> m
> e
> + Knowledge gained
>
>
>
> That's not the conventional layout of the axis, but it does make sense, and
> it's more likely that people have this reversed layout in mind when
> thinking about "steepness of learning" than it is that they were thinking
> about the original curve and misinterpreting the meaning of the gradient.

No, that is what people come up with afterwards. If you just start a conversation
about how people learn and how long it would take to get some mastery and how we
could present progress in a graph, virtually everyone uses the conventional axes
layout. This talk about swapped axes only come from people who used the steep
learning curve metaphor, when you then try to show them what an actual steep
learning curve implies.