3 ms·
Along the same lines, tanh-like curves describe a lot of shit across many domains, especially technology. Plateaus due to some fundamental limit, rapid rise aft
by chermi 2mo ago
Along the same lines, tanh-like curves describe a lot of shit across many domains, especially technology. Plateaus due to some fundamental limit, rapid rise after long slow start, then marginal gains become harder.
Both also follow from very simple physical/mathematical arguments. See strogatz book or ken dill's thermo book for example. I'm partial to energy landscape perspective for most everything. Free energy and entropy - entropy balance applies to more than you'd expect if you allow some liberty in interpretation
- gw32 2mo agoI'm glad to find someone who shares this perspective. Sigmoids show up everywhere (e.g. elo). One big area is AI ability. Coding agents have gone from completely unreliable to quite reliable at basic tasks. Maybe this could be true about practiced abilities in general. For example, at some point circus entertainers must go from almost never succeeding to succeeding enough to put their lives at stake. It seems that at a certain point, with enough practice or intelligence, you reach a critical threshold where success rate switches from almost never to almost certain. And I am also a big fan of potential energy surfaces - it always seemed like a huge upgrade going from crude 1D to multi-dimensional reaction coordinates. A big conceptual shift for me was to learn that transition states are not maxima, but first order saddle points. Though I do wish I could have a better grasp on entropy's role. Also for example PES's connection to diffusion models and flow matching
- chermi 2mo agooops meant energy - entropy balance