Vaclav Smil is great on this, I really liked his book Growth. He takes a very numerate but still very different view on history (e.g., ah, fitting a sigmoid to GDP numbers in the book).
(I don’t know if the book is good but my knee jerk reaction to fitting sigmoids to things is it’s a bit spooky—see https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.08065)
Fwiw, I read a number of Smil’s books, and it was my impression that he strongly expressed that same opinion about sigmoids, and the mentioned example might have been precisely an attempt to illustrate how you can show everything with fitting the right sigmoid. (But it’s been awhile since I read his books)
Vaclav Smil is great on this, I really liked his book Growth. He takes a very numerate but still very different view on history (e.g., ah, fitting a sigmoid to GDP numbers in the book).
(I don’t know if the book is good but my knee jerk reaction to fitting sigmoids to things is it’s a bit spooky—see https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.08065)
It is, and it’s the thing I’d most like Smil to read if I could recommend something to him.
Fwiw, I read a number of Smil’s books, and it was my impression that he strongly expressed that same opinion about sigmoids, and the mentioned example might have been precisely an attempt to illustrate how you can show everything with fitting the right sigmoid. (But it’s been awhile since I read his books)