So no, not just your pet peeve. I personally hate 100% increase and that sort of thing. Even if I know the correct interpretation, I have no idea if the writer did.
Lordy, YES. A successful business must have good communication. Not people saying "actually, I was right, but ...".
Now, any time I see anything more than 100% for an increase, I assume the person doesn't know how to say it properly, and the vast majority of the time I'm correct. I certainly never make any decisions (including opinions) based on that information without doing the math myself.
"wrong" and "correct" are only defined by what people actually say - if people mainly say "101% increase" to mean "new value = old value * 1.01" then that's what it means whether it makes sense grammatically or not.
I can't just go around saying that my cat is siamese even if he's not just because I got it wrong one time and now this is what siamese means to me. Because my goal is to transmit accurate messages.
In addition, don't express changes in terms of ratios, express them in terms of actual quantities.
So instead of saying "our efficiency increased by 100%", get rid of the ratio and express it as a multiple of the relevant underlying quantities, e.g. "our costs are 0.5x".
The problem is that the whole sentence doesn't make sense with a number there. "Company claims 10 price hike drove it from VMware..."
Would be lovely, but transparency is not good for every way of doing business :’ )
Would you really get more value from the headline if it said "923% increase" instead of 1000%?
I think you've just proven OPs point. 10x is a 900% increase, or 1,000% of the original price, not 1,100%.
Using percentage for anything other than a fraction of something (i.e. <= 100%) is usually done for effect, often done incorrectly, and even if done "correctly", leads to exactly this kind of confusion.
Whereas the inverse of 3x is (1/3)x and still far clearer (three times the size and one third the size).
Meanwhile 3x “smaller” is the inverse of 3x “bigger”, not 300% “increase”, which is mathematically different. The adjectives break our brains. Much easier to comprehend if we don’t use them, using “the size” instead.
Yes. Increase means the number went up. A 200% increase means that it increased by 200% of the original, so you have the original 1x and the increase of 2x for a total of 3x.
Your logic: 100% means 1. A 100% increase is x * 1.
Correct logic: 100% means 1. A 100% increase is x + (x * 1)
Your 30% example is the same x + (x * 0.3)
200% is x + (x * 2) for a total of 3 times the original amount.
Same goes for 1000% being x + (x * 10) for a total of 11 times the original amount.
(This difference became especially noticeable to me after playing^W practicing my math skills with incremental games for obscene amounts of time.)
"200%" increase vs "100%" increase is double the difference, a far more significant number.
A "price hike" is not necessary an "increase", i.e. a sum of the old price and a change, which is X + X * (P/100). It very well might also mean "a price hike to Y", i.e. "the new price is now P percent of the old" which is a multiple (X * (P/100)).
But yeah, it's usually very confusing for all the parties involved, especially when the change is negative.
A "price hike" is always an increase, and specifically a large increase. If the value has decreased it'd be a "price drop" and a large drop would be a "price slash".
Again, what I meant is, of course, "price hike" in itself always constitutes some increase, but its nature can be one of two: 1. positive delta 2. setting the price to a ratio > 1.
And of course, the worst people of all think that one third is less than one fourth.
Personally, I blame the widespread usage of decimal notation rather than fractions. The so-called ‘metric’ system (a misnomer, because every system of measurements … measures) bears a lot of blame here.