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The trouble with exponential growth is that the curve feels flat in the beginning. It isn't; it's still a wonderful exponential curve. But we can't grasp that intuitively, so we underrate exponential growth in its early stages.

How to Do Great Work

Exponentials are crucial to understanding how human societies grow, yet it’s hard to appreciate how a modest number like a 2% annual economic growth rate results in a doubling of the size of an economy in just thirty-five years.

Paul Behrens • The Best of Times, The Worst of Times: Futures from the Frontiers of Climate Science

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A Smart Bear » The Elephant in the room: The myth of exponential hypergrowth

Jason Cohen longform.asmartbear.com

Ben Gilbert • Tweet

Said plainly, each time a user joins an app with a network behind it, the value of the app is increased to n^2. That means if a network has 100 nodes and then doubles to 200, its value more than doubles—it quadruples.

Andrew Chen • The Cold Start Problem: How to Start and Scale Network Effects

Nature prefers growth that is either vertigo-inducing or decidedly softer: exponentials and logarithms appear everywhere in its equations. Nature is, by its own nature, nonlinear.

Paolo Giordano • How Contagion Works: Science, Awareness, and Community in Times of Global Crises - The Essay That Helped Change the Covid-19 Debate

"Compounding is magic. Look for it everywhere. Exponential curves are the key to wealth generation" ~Sama Senpai https://t.co/IufjomfRz9

Kartikay

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Paul Graham on how life is not linear, but rather exponential:

"Teachers and coaches implicitly told us the returns were linear. "You get out," I heard a thousand times, "what you put in." They meant well, but this is rarely true. If your product is only half as good as your competitor's, you don't get half as many customers. You get no customers, a