Stop Calling It “The Law of Large Numbers”!

A public service announcement

It’s not “The Wheat and Chessboard Problem” either (but I like the imagery!)

Just a quick PSA here…

When you refer to “The Law of Large Numbers”, what you really mean is “The Logistic Principle”:

“[The Law of Large Numbers] has nothing whatever to do with growth. What it actually says is that as a large number of samples of a random variable are taken from a population, the mean of the samples approaches the expected value of the population. In other (and simplified) terms, the larger your sample the better your estimate of the actual value… the basis of all sampling, polling, and inferential statistics…

“So what do we call the principle that the growth rate of things tends to slow as they get larger? The idea is kind of obvious, which may be why it doesn’t have a name [so] I propose we call it the logistic principle.”

— Steve Wildstrom (via Techpinions, highlights courtesy of Annotote)

Depending on the context, you could also insert “Diminishing Returns to Scale” or “Sustainable Growth Rate”.

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