Also, have you tracked the previous discussion on Old Scott Alexanderand LessWrong about generally “mysterious straight lines” being a surprisingly common phenomenon in economics. i.e. On an old AI post Oli noted:
This is one of my major go-to examples of this really weird linear phenomenon:
150 years of a completely straight line! There were two world wars in there, the development of artificial fertilizer, the broad industrialization of society, the invention of the car. And all throughout the line just carries one, with no significant perturbations.
This doesn’t mean we should automatically take new proposed Straight Line Phenomena at face value, I don’t actually know if this is more like “pretty common actually” or “there are a few notable times it was true that are drawing undue attention.” But I’m at least not like “this is a never-before-seen anomaly”)
Also, have you tracked the previous discussion on Old Scott Alexander and LessWrong about generally “mysterious straight lines” being a surprisingly common phenomenon in economics. i.e. On an old AI post Oli noted:
This doesn’t mean we should automatically take new proposed Straight Line Phenomena at face value, I don’t actually know if this is more like “pretty common actually” or “there are a few notable times it was true that are drawing undue attention.” But I’m at least not like “this is a never-before-seen anomaly”)
That surprisingly straight line reminds me of what happens when you use noise to regularise an otherwise decidedly non linear function: https://www.imaginary.org/snapshot/randomness-is-natural-an-introduction-to-regularisation-by-noise