Curious Omission In New-Style Formats

[Antoon Pardon]

Op 15-07-16 om 15:39 schreef Random832:
>
> On Fri, Jul 15, 2016, at 07:44, Antoon Pardon wrote:
>
>> 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.
> _Why_ do you think this? The natural way to graph progress vs effort is
> to have progress on the horizontal access and effort on the vertical
> axis, because that's what you get when you're climbing a literal hill,
> the only context in the universe where "vertical" and "horizontal"
> aren't arbitrarily assigned but are real spatial dimensions.

No that is not the natural way. That is the way you pick afterwards if
you want your graph to resemble the metaphor. But it is not the way
people "naturally" graph these numbers, if the metafor was not put
into their head in first place. Certainly not people who actually study
these kind of things.

> The only reason to do it the other way is an association with time and
> the convention of using time for the horizontal axis.

No the reason is, we prefer the graph to be a function. That is for every x
at most one y. Using the axes the other way around would mean that set backs
would result in multiple y values for the same x.

-- 
Antoon Pardon.