Why humans misjudge exponential growth: it's an out-of-distribution problem
GregCook2011 · x · 2026-11-08
Andrew Curran offers a compact take: humans struggle to intuit exponential growth because such examples almost never appeared in our ancestral environment — exponential growth is effectively absent from our "training data," making it an out-of-distribution problem for human cognition. The framing borrows the ML notion of OOD to explain the cognitive bias.
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