Re:Take a Break You Idiot
by kqr on Sunday October 09, 2022 @07:37AM
(#33140086)
But it's not strictly false! Not without qualification.
Outcome is a sort of quadratic function of effort, so with very little effort you improve outcome a lot. Then as you go on and put more effort in, you continue to improve outcome. As you put a lot of effort in, the size of the improvement declines, but the outcome is still improved.
Then at some level of effort there's a plateau, after which additional effort really does make things work. But that plateau is a surprising amount of effort away! When researchers talk about declining productivity with increasing effort, they mean this first derivative of outcome, not declining outcome itself.
And, to get to my point, a line is an excellent approximation of this quadratic function for most of the range of it we see normally. So it's no surprise people try to extrapolate using it.
I think you have to acknowledge the complexity of the problem to help people understand the mistake!
Outcome is a sort of quadratic function of effort, so with very little effort you improve outcome a lot. Then as you go on and put more effort in, you continue to improve outcome. As you put a lot of effort in, the size of the improvement declines, but the outcome is still improved.
Then at some level of effort there's a plateau, after which additional effort really does make things work. But that plateau is a surprising amount of effort away! When researchers talk about declining productivity with increasing effort, they mean this first derivative of outcome, not declining outcome itself.
And, to get to my point, a line is an excellent approximation of this quadratic function for most of the range of it we see normally. So it's no surprise people try to extrapolate using it.
I think you have to acknowledge the complexity of the problem to help people understand the mistake!