People aren't surprised when I tell them there are 13,000 Covid-19 cases outside China, or when I tell them this number doubles every 3 days. But when I tell them that if growth continues at this rate, we'll have 1.7 million cases in 3 weeks, they're astonished.
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I've never met anyone with a gut feel for exponential growth. You always have to calculate it. But everyone in the startup world at least knows never to turn their back on it.
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Replying to @paulg
Actually, it's like anything else: experience promotes intuition, and extensive experience promotes profound intuition. Trouble is, so few persons ever really do large calculations by hand anymore. Pretty sure that Henry Briggs had a superb gut feeling for exponential growth.
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It's worth noting that Euler memorized the first thirty or so powers of the first five natural numbers, and used logarithm tables constantly (as did Gauss, whose first logarithm table remained throughout his long life a prized possession.) People once had all this in their bones.
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