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Then I guess Rhodium is the largest metal and the Hinkley Point C nuclear power station is the largest building in Britain. If you conflate value with size, bo

Then I guess Rhodium is the largest metal and the Hinkley Point C nuclear power station is the largest building in Britain. If you conflate value with size, both terms become near useless. Value can only mean something in relation to something else. Picture this: You have a large company with thousands of employees having similar revenue to their competitor, which accomplishes the same with one employee and a much smaller operation. Which one is likely to be more valuable? Obviously the smaller one. If we however conflate value with size, as is so often done in popular economics, just pointing out this single fact becomes a complicated exercise of having to carefully employ language that we neutered for no good reason at all. Not to speak of all the misunderstandings this is going to create with people who aren't used to this imprecise use of the English language. If you mean revenue, say revenue, if you mean value, say value, if you mean size, say size. Don't use "large" to say "valuable". Why would you do that if there's a perfectly good word already? Imprecise language is often used to either confuse or leave open an avenue to cover one's ass later... which brings us back to popular economics.

quesera 2y ago
"Size" is unitless, so I disagree with your rationale. Precision is always helpful, but valuation is a very common size metric, and there was no confusion about OP's meaning.
- chmod775 2y ago
  > "Size" is unitless, so I disagree with your rationale. You're going to have to expand that a little bit. > valuation is a very common size metric It's not a size metric. A world where things grow larger the more people value them might be interesting though. > and there was no confusion about OP's meaning. Their comment makes much less sense if you replace "biggest" with "most valuable". It's trivially obvious that the correlation between valuation and how much a company can invest into software is incredibly weak if it exists at all. On software development spending NVidia is eclipsed by many companies with sometimes only a fraction of its valuation. So either it's a non sequitur or we are incorrectly assuming that Nvidia became the largest company.
  - bmacho 2y ago
    > A world where things grow larger the more people value them might be interesting though. Do you personally grow larger when you have more money in the bank? When more of your friends get elected in the senate? When you hire someone? When you buy a new house?
    - chmod775 2y ago
      Obviously not?
  - quesera 2y ago
    "Size" is not only a metric of physical dimension. OP said "biggest", and meant "largest valuation". This happens to be incorrect -- nVidia was never the highest-valued public company -- but they were the second-largest, and came very close to first. If you did not know what OP meant immediately from awareness of business news, you still should have considered "valuation" as one of the obvious possibilities. If you did not, then you might be lacking adequate context for this conversation, and might be better served by asking questions instead of demonstrating your confusion via misplaced pedantry.
    - chmod775 2y ago
      > "Size" is not only a metric Size is not a metric. You can measure size with a metric and you can measure value with another metric. Measuring both the same way only leads to nonsense. I think we're getting to the bottom of the confusion now. > misplaced pedantry Pedantry is the easiest way of dismantling comments that try to turn nonsense into an argument by being intentionally vague. Should you argue directly against vague statements, the speaker can retroactively make them mean whatever they want to. You'll be chasing moving goalposts. Employ pedantry until they well and truly nail themselves down, and then explain why whatever is left is nonsense. Worked like a charm. Also, to get ahead of any further personal attacks, this pedantry absolutely is fun to me. I wouldn't be here otherwise.
      - quesera 2y ago

quesera 2y ago

"Size" is unitless, so I disagree with your rationale. Precision is always helpful, but valuation is a very common size metric, and there was no confusion about OP's meaning.

chmod775 2y ago
> "Size" is unitless, so I disagree with your rationale. You're going to have to expand that a little bit. > valuation is a very common size metric It's not a size metric. A world where things grow larger the more people value them might be interesting though. > and there was no confusion about OP's meaning. Their comment makes much less sense if you replace "biggest" with "most valuable". It's trivially obvious that the correlation between valuation and how much a company can invest into software is incredibly weak if it exists at all. On software development spending NVidia is eclipsed by many companies with sometimes only a fraction of its valuation. So either it's a non sequitur or we are incorrectly assuming that Nvidia became the largest company.
- bmacho 2y ago
  > A world where things grow larger the more people value them might be interesting though. Do you personally grow larger when you have more money in the bank? When more of your friends get elected in the senate? When you hire someone? When you buy a new house?
  - chmod775 2y ago
    Obviously not?
- quesera 2y ago
  "Size" is not only a metric of physical dimension. OP said "biggest", and meant "largest valuation". This happens to be incorrect -- nVidia was never the highest-valued public company -- but they were the second-largest, and came very close to first. If you did not know what OP meant immediately from awareness of business news, you still should have considered "valuation" as one of the obvious possibilities. If you did not, then you might be lacking adequate context for this conversation, and might be better served by asking questions instead of demonstrating your confusion via misplaced pedantry.
  - chmod775 2y ago
    > "Size" is not only a metric Size is not a metric. You can measure size with a metric and you can measure value with another metric. Measuring both the same way only leads to nonsense. I think we're getting to the bottom of the confusion now. > misplaced pedantry Pedantry is the easiest way of dismantling comments that try to turn nonsense into an argument by being intentionally vague. Should you argue directly against vague statements, the speaker can retroactively make them mean whatever they want to. You'll be chasing moving goalposts. Employ pedantry until they well and truly nail themselves down, and then explain why whatever is left is nonsense. Worked like a charm. Also, to get ahead of any further personal attacks, this pedantry absolutely is fun to me. I wouldn't be here otherwise.
    - quesera 2y ago