• Nate Cox@programming.dev
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    17 hours ago

    I loathe and despise using percentages like this.

    500% sounds super scary, but is meaningless without providing the baseline. If there was only one instance before and now there’s 5 it isn’t a significant increase but 500% sure sounds scary.

    • tabular@lemmy.world
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      15 hours ago

      Worse still it’s not even clear what is being discussed. It implied “violence” but that is a wide range from just pushing to serious shooting.

      % can also be misleading when a scale is arbitrary. A temperature increase measured in Fahrenheit will be a rather different % when converted to Kelvin.