5 ms·
"Over the last 5+ years, Uber has grown by orders of magnitude, with our top line nearly tripling" Orders of magnitude.
by danielmarkbruce 1mo ago
"Over the last 5+ years, Uber has grown by orders of magnitude, with our top line nearly tripling"
Orders of magnitude.
- techgnosis 1mo agoHe didn't say "Uber has grown by orders of magnitude" == "top line nearly tripling" They are two separate statements. Maybe some portions of Uber did grow exponentially. Riders, revenue, miles travelled, etc... He also wants you to know that as part of that exponential growth, top line nearly tripled.
- danielmarkbruce 1mo agoYou can't give a concrete and nonsensical way Uber has grown 100x (minimum number of "orders") while revenue tripled. Cannot be miles. Can't be riders. Can't be drivers. Revenue is top line, by definition. This statement is as bad as the original. There is no need for hyperbolic statements that one doesn't even understand. "Uber has grown significantly" works. Why the need to sound so sophisticated and use terms like "orders of magnitude" ? It erodes trust by signaling "we are full of sh*t".
- lirolero 1mo agoHe’s basically saying Uber is much bigger than it was 5+ years ago. Revenue almost tripled, and the company added a lot more products, people, and complexity. “Orders of magnitude” here just means “a lot,” not literally 10x or 100x.
- bamboozled 1mo agoThen he could just say uber has grown a lot?
- lirolero 1mo agoHe could have said a myriad of things, but he chose to say that, and what he chose to say isn’t incorrect.
- danielmarkbruce 1mo agoyes, it is. It's incorrect, misleading and douchey. If they didn't say "revenue tripled" and you asked people to speculate how much Uber had grown in 5 years given the statement, you'd get a lot of guesses around 100x.
- lirolero 1mo agoskill issue
- kingstnap 1mo agoThey are simply measuring in base 1.7 :^) Uber has grown 2 orders of magnitude!
- danielmarkbruce 1mo agotouche.
- mncharity 1mo agoOr base 2. 2^1.5 (2.83) is the low bound on two orders of magnitude base 2. So tripled fits. All this concern, when he merely assumed everyone would realize he meant oom base 2. :P
- mncharity 1mo ago> has grown 100x (minimum number of "orders") Two orders of magnitude is 31.6 to 316 (10^1.5 to 10^2.5), so 32x would be sufficient. Most Uber 5-year growth numbers seem less than 3x. Steelmanning, some programs seem new in 2021 (Uber One, autonomous driving), and thus might have grown more dramatically as they spun up. But yes, eep. Maybe misuse will, by getting more exposure for the term, eventually get us more people who know and use it properly? Maybe?
- missedthecue 1mo agoI have noticed that "orders of magnitude" is getting the same colloquial treatment that has long-since happened to "decimated". That is, a departure in common parlance from the technical meaning of the word to one used to communicate a general description of largeness.
- danielmarkbruce 1mo agoSure, but the use of "decimated" is used approximately correctly in most cases, even if not precisely right. And it is a cool sounding word, and it's one word. "Orders of magnitude" is three words when one would do, it's used to sound sophisticated, and it's use is off by... an order of magnitude or so... in many cases
- xnx 1mo agoFor a long time I thought it meant to reduce to 1/10th not by 1/10th.
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- kridsdale1 1mo agoYes. As a kid, hearing it used in like GI Joe or something, it always felt equivalent to “massacred”.
- missedthecue 1mo agoHmm... Sometimes decimated is used in ways that are colloquially understandable but actually make no sense at all. For example, "Sadly, my team got decimated in the playoffs". That doesn't even make sense. 1/10th of the team lost the game? What?
- treis 1mo agoThink it's more like the worst thing that can happen to a Roman army unit happened to us.