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Comment by l0b0 | Hacker News Reader

IMO, since they're not suggesting anything better they are not helping. It's like telling people "just don't do that if it's causing problems". Well, what's the alternative? We still have this concept we need to communicate effectively, of something that's hard but possible to learn if you spend a lot of energy on it, analogous to how you spend a lot of energy climbing a steep hill.

Also, have you ever met anyone who thought "steep learning curve" was ambiguous? This seems like a controversy invented by some really literal-minded people who are not representative of the general population.

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> have you ever met anyone who thought "steep learning curve" was ambiguous?

Yep, that’s me. When I first encountered this expression it seemed very strange to me (not exactly ambiguous since I guessed the meaning). I envisioned a plot, with a steep curve: x is time, but what’s on y? You see, there are no mountains where I’ve grown up…

Eventually I’ve come to think of it: x is pleasure that you will be able to extract from the game, y is amount you have to learn to extract that pleasure.

But now I do not think much when I hear the expression. “Steep learning curve?” - ok, I know what you mean. Changing the meaning to its opposite would cause me a great confusion, bigger than the first one.

Yeah, right now signal/noise for this statement is huge, because IMO at most 50% of people (likely much less, only the kind of people who are more used to graphs than mountains) who have a good grasp of English but have never heard this expression might get the wrong idea when they hear it for the first time. If we try to invert the meaning it will reduce signal/noise, because the vast majority of people who know the original meaning will now have less information about what you actually mean. We basically have two sensible choices: leave things as is or invent a new phrase which captures the idea even better than the current one.

> I envisioned a plot, with a steep curve: x is time, but what’s on y?

This question really got me thinking, because I've always envisioned a plot as well, but the phrase always made sense to me.

I realized that I think of x being "mastery" and y being "knowledge required". On such a plot, you'd see a steep curve if one needs a relatively large amount of knowledge to progress to the next level of mastery.

I've never thought of it differently, and so never realized that the phrase is ambiguous until reading the article. Upon reflection, it makes much more sense plotting time on x and mastery on y when talking about learning.

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