wide thoughts

I keep bumping into articles or presentations where “steep learning curve” is improperly used, so I’ve decided to clear up the confusion. People often think that steep learning curve means something that requires a great deal of effort to learn. Well, it doesn’t.

Given the most common agreement about graphs of functions, we put effort (time, number of trials) on x-axis, and knowledge (skill) on y-axis. Knowledge is a function of effort; this means that f(x) will tell us the amount of knowledge a person has, given the amount of effort the person has put into something.

Let’s take a look at a shallow learning curve.

You can see that knowledge rises rather slowly as effort is put in learning. This means that something is hard to learn.

Now let’s take a look at a steep learning curve.

It’s obvious that knowledge is gained very fast. Even with a small amount of effort, skill gets high quite fast. This means that something is easy to learn.

So, remember that steep learning curve means easy to learn, and gradual learning curve means hard to learn, and stop misusing the term.