And the reason we need to try analogies and hyperbole is because even people who are arguing in good faith don't get exponential growth.
Normal people look at 2 on day 1, 4 on day 4, 8 on day 7 and think "Oh, about 4 every 3 days. Shrug. No big deal." Horizontal.
Epidemiologists look at that and go "AHHHHH! Doubling every 3 days. Shut everything down or we'll have a million in 2 months and 10 million a week later." They're looking at the vertical section of the curve.
This is similar to people misunderstanding fire. Most people have experienced a campfire. The energy drops off like 1/r^3, so it's no big deal. Most people haven't experienced a wind driven wall of flame where the energy drops off like 1/r so things simply spontaneously combust next to the flamefront. And that's just cubic vs linear.
> Normal people look at 2 on day 1, 4 on day 4, 8 on day 7 and think "Oh, about 4 every 3 days. Shrug. No big deal." Horizontal.
Yeah well HN is mostly a bunch of software engineers who spend most of their day relying on the fundamental that at the end of 32 days in your example, there'll be 4 billion, so...
On the other hand your example is extremely contrived, because exponential growth in epidemiology is mostly not possible except for short periods.
