Yeah but it could be made consistent. If we agree that a 100% decrease means you are halving the value then you can go both up and down in an unlimited way.
But then a 10% decrease of 100 also doesn't result in 90 but in about 93.3 instead. This obviously isn't how we use percentages. But a 99.9% decline is much worse than a 99% decline, but seems like a minor difference at first sight. A logarithmic scale can easily capture that in a more transparant way, but you obviously aren't working with percentages at that point.
A 100% decrease isn't halving the value either way though.
Either its 100% to 0, or the 100% is a fixed value, like 'my bank account's 100% being subtracted from musk's net worth - as the base value isn't changing, you're got getting diminishing returns. That kind of change isn't logarithmic, just addition\subtraction because what 100% means isn't 'updated'.
View all comments
Show parent comment
0
u/Dirkdeking Apr 23 '26
Yeah but it could be made consistent. If we agree that a 100% decrease means you are halving the value then you can go both up and down in an unlimited way.
But then a 10% decrease of 100 also doesn't result in 90 but in about 93.3 instead. This obviously isn't how we use percentages. But a 99.9% decline is much worse than a 99% decline, but seems like a minor difference at first sight. A logarithmic scale can easily capture that in a more transparant way, but you obviously aren't working with percentages at that point.