On 2007-04-21, Diez B. Roggisch <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Antoon Pardon schrieb: >> On 2007-04-20, Diez B. Roggisch <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >>>> So if you have the choice between a steep or a shalow income curve >>>> you will prefer the shalow curve because a steep curve makes you >>>> think about verticale clifs and such? >>>> >>>> The analogy with a walk is just silly because curves are not like walks. >>>> Nobody will say something like: I won't invest in that company because >>>> it has a steep profit curve or the reverse: I'll invest in this company >>>> because it has an easy looking downhill going profit curve. >>> Your whole argumentation bases on the fact that the result of the >>> learning process, and the success of it, has something to do with the >>> reached height - or y-axis-value - of your climb. >>> >>> Which is nonsense. The goal is to go from A - ignorance - to B - >>> knowledge - which both lie on the X-Axis. >> >> Well if you want to do it that way, nobody can stop you, but people >> in the habit of processing numbers usually put the time on the X-axis >> like in time spend learning or exercising and put the other value >> on the Y-axis. > > > You seem to live in a very limited world, where bezier-curves (note the > name...) > are parametrized over t, but rendered on the x/y-axis happily going > forth and back and whatnot.
I'm not talking about bezier-curves or any parametric curve, because it doesn't make sense to talk about steep and shalow curves then, since there is no implication of hard/slow easy/fast associated then with steep or shalow, you might as well use polar coordinates. > If using knowledge as the x-axis and effort on the y-axis, the figure of > speech makes perfect sense. That is an after the fact interpretation. There certain rules/conventions in picking your variables when you want to draw a curve. The association of steep and shalow of a curve with some real world implication depends on those rules/conventions. If you don't follow those rules/conventions don't think you can get a message across by saying steep, because any data can be put on a steep curve if you are allowed to pick how to draw your axes. So your statement doesn't mean much more than: After I have played with the paper, turned it over, rotated it a bit, the curve looks steep. >> That is because people prefer a curve going up and down while moving >> to the right instead of going left and right while moving up. > > Which is obviously something people don't want to do in this context, > because "going down" doesn't make too much sense here, doesn't it? Or do > you want to cram the process of unlearning in the little figure of > speech as well? Then those people shouldn't refer to curves. If people want to refer to curves in order to bring a message accross then the message should make sense to those familiar with curves. I can understand that some people find that doing so, makes their message feel wrong. Not a problem, use an other metaphor. Don't twist the metaphor to get a message that feels all right to you but brings nonsense to those who are familiar with the metaphor. > But even a perfectly sense-making explanation can be found, I doubt that > you will ever acknowledge that you did make a mistake on this one - as > you always (or better never) do... As far as I can see I don't differ from most people in this respect on this news group. -- Antoon Pardon -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
