Comparing a made-up exponential to a process that no scientist who knew anything about radioactivity would expect to model with anything but a sum of coupled exponentials is a bit of a straw man. There’s a bias to simplicity, certainly, but there’s not that much bias!
I used radioactivity example because it was painfully (as in smacked in the face by truth) clear what the correct answer is. But people do use stupid models like simple exponential growth for things like population and economic growth all the time.
Comparing a made-up exponential to a process that no scientist who knew anything about radioactivity would expect to model with anything but a sum of coupled exponentials is a bit of a straw man. There’s a bias to simplicity, certainly, but there’s not that much bias!
I used radioactivity example because it was painfully (as in smacked in the face by truth) clear what the correct answer is. But people do use stupid models like simple exponential growth for things like population and economic growth all the time.
Like certain singulatarian futurists.
So someone has mentioned it on LW after all. Lots of singulatarian ideas depend heavily exponential growth.