[21723]

It's almost certainly exponential, but the rate of growth depends on a number of dynamic factors. Corrupt elites often shut growth down. It happened in China and Japan several times in the second millennium, and it's happening in the US in the third one; we've backslid since about 1970.

[lliamander]

All exponential functions in nature are really S-curves. Slow-downs could absolutely be the result of corruption, but could be natural limits of whatever process enabled the initial growth

[daniel-cussen]

Yeah there's always economic miracles or Moore's law but for diodes or some shit, something, they all peter out. All of them. No exceptions. All of them.

Moore's law is in the saggy part of the S-curve, it's been morally dead for fourteen years in some ways, eleven years in others, and for eight years transistors flat out don't shrink at all they just pack more of them in the same space. I saw this coming, I did the math with the size of the transistors and the size of the chips and realized 99.5% of the area on a chip was empty back when 14 nanometer was the smallest. That's what new lithographies go for, they fill up that empty space. It ain't over til it's over, but when it is in fact over, it's over. It's over.

[1] South Korea, China, which is the new one? Is there a new one? A lot of the time it's artificial and carefully presented to market the exponential curve shit, mainly by lying about the beginning of the segment to make it look smaller and the end of the segment to make it look bigger. Shoehorning it. Also defining the segment as unique, like giving it an identity so it's meaningful to isolate it from the bigger picture which is not exponential because it has a past and a future. Moore's Law talks about transistors, why not talk about valves instead and look at the history since the nineteenth century, or since Leibniz for that matter? Like you can make a switch out of wood, people did, they transmitted energy by moving staffs of wood back and forth. Cuckoo clocks. Antikythera mechanism. The abacus. Mental arithmetic.

The big thing there is for usury, usurers have to keep the dream of exponential growth alive to charge exponential compound interest without getting tarred and feathered like so many usurers before them.

[lupire]

Exponential compound interest is just linear simple interest with a fixed term loan with auto renewal of non -paid balance.

Why would anyone ever pay back a loan if it had zero additional interest for extending the term?

[daniel-cussen]

Why would anyone ever pay back a loan if it had zero additional interest for extending the term?

I have excellent answers to that. Well first off I would, because I pay loans in order from most benevolent to least benevolent. Second I figure out the mathematical theory that generalizes interest, and includes all types of interest as special cases, and compound interest is the special case number infinity, the most morally wrong case.

[_hcuq]

That is a great rant. Bravo!

[epgui]

That first sentence could replace the entire paper. Growth functions are inherently/fundamentally exponential (regardless of whether we're talking about bacterial colonies, populations of rabbits, compound interest or ROI), but the forces that act on the exponent change over time. It really is this simple.

[marginalia_nu]

Real exponential growth is fairly rare outside mathematical models, it is almost always attenuated by logistical bottlenecks or resource scarcity after some initial phase.

[lupire]

That applies to linear growths too. In the long run almost everything is eventually a constant, approximately step function from intitial to terminal condition.

[epgui]

Sure, but I'd then make the same (modified) argument.

[ravi-delia]

That's not really true though. Regardless of whether our growth is exponential or logistic, we haven't hit an inflection point yet. So if the past data is better fit by a linear function, the logistic nature of our growth can't be the reason.

[jacobolus]

> Growth functions are inherently/fundamentally exponential but the forces that act on the exponent change over time

By this standard, every function is “fundamentally exponential”.

You can plot literally any (strictly positive, differentiable) function on a log scale and find the slope at every point. BAM! Look, an exponent (changing over time)!

[epgui]

Don't be facetious. In real life, the forces acting on the exponent correspond to real things that are related to the thing we're observing grow.

If you don't have a causal graph explaining why your exponent is changing, then your plot doesn't make sense.

[jasonwatkinspdx]

Oh, and what proof do you have to offer that those exponentials are not sigmoids?

[marginalia_nu]

If the rate of growth varies dynamically over time, then it is not exponential growth. Exponential growth only varies in proportion to itself.

[lupire]

It's all epicycles of exponents on exponents. The world is a Fourier series.

[marginalia_nu]

You can likewise argue that all the world is a bunch of polynomials or whatever based on Taylor series. It's not particularly informative.

[daniel-cussen]

> Corrupt elites often shut growth down.

Yeah so that's oncologists for one, suppose I go to Cuba to a real doctor the likes of which cannot be found in America and get treated for cancer. That's precisely what I want is for that doctor to shut the growth of the tumor down, be a corrupt elite to that tumor, tell it the show's over. It's part of my body like the runaway growth thing is part of the economy, but if either growth is harming its surrounding environment, taking up resources or pushing things out, forget it. Tumor repression, oppression and suppression, all three!

Exponential growth is too unstable, it can't go on forever. If it had taken place since before the Middle Ages, or any other dark age, like it would be too stupid everyone would either own or owe a galaxy. It's not just that's too much, it's also that would be a highly stupid premise for a life to be born into. So it's marketed like "hey we'd all be rich" but come on, for there to be credit there has to be debt, no creditors without debtors. In these fantasies they never talk about who'd be the debtor, but here's a hint, between the speaker talking about we are all going to be too rich for sins to matter, and the listeners, it's not the speaker.

[ravi-delia]

Exponential growth can't go on forever (according to our current understanding of physics anyway), but we're a long way away from the cap. Plenty of resources in the solar system, after all. I'm not unconcerned that our resources can only grow as fast as our lightcone, but I don't lose much sleep either.

[lupire]

I used to worry about the heat death of the Universe, before I realized life will annihilate itself first.

[ravi-delia]

Eh, we're a hardy weed. Barring a threat like none we've seen thus far, we'll get there.