Friday, January 17, 2014

Aggregation of marginal gains, and losses

I came across this article by James Clear by seeing Guy Kawasaki talk about it. Let me repost the original graph here for reference:

Graph by James Clear


Point of the article aside, the nerd inside me couldn't help but mention that the curve for marginal losses (the red curve) is wrongly depicted. A marginal loss of 1% means that at each step, we get closer to zero, but never quite hit it. 

This is what the correct graph should look like:

Graph by me, using Google plot and post-modifications.

The simple intuition is that if we keep losing 1% of what we have, the aggregate losses can never go lower than -1, which means losing all of the original 100%.



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