Maybe a dumb question, but those log scale graphs have uneven ticks on the x axis, is there a reason they structured it like that beyond trying to draw a straight line? I suspect there is a good reason and it’s not dishonesty but this does look like something one would do if you wanted to exaggerate the slope
I believe this is standard/acceptable for presenting log-axis data, but I’m not sure. This is a graph from the Kaplan paper:
It is certainly frustrating that they don’t label the x-axis. Here’s a quick conversation where I asked GPT4o to explain. You are correct that a quick look at this graph (where you don’t notice the log-scale) would imply (highly surprising and very strong) linear scaling trends. Scaling laws are generally very sub-linear, in particular often following a power-law. I don’t think they tried to mislead about this, instead this is a domain where log-scaling axes is super common and doesn’t invalidate the results in any way.
Maybe a dumb question, but those log scale graphs have uneven ticks on the x axis, is there a reason they structured it like that beyond trying to draw a straight line? I suspect there is a good reason and it’s not dishonesty but this does look like something one would do if you wanted to exaggerate the slope
I believe this is standard/acceptable for presenting log-axis data, but I’m not sure. This is a graph from the Kaplan paper:
It is certainly frustrating that they don’t label the x-axis. Here’s a quick conversation where I asked GPT4o to explain. You are correct that a quick look at this graph (where you don’t notice the log-scale) would imply (highly surprising and very strong) linear scaling trends. Scaling laws are generally very sub-linear, in particular often following a power-law. I don’t think they tried to mislead about this, instead this is a domain where log-scaling axes is super common and doesn’t invalidate the results in any way.
Ah wait was reading it wrong. I thought each time was an order of magnitude, that looks to be standard notation for log scale. Mischief managed