There doesn't seem to be consensus among economists regarding whether those "solid arguments" actually describe the world we're living in, though.
On a darker note, "spiral" also has a memetic connection to insanity, delirium, or loss of will — as in the 😵💫 emoji, the 1987 mind-control-apocalypse cartoon Spiral Zone, the TMBG song "Spiraling Shape" (will make you go insane!), etc.
I don't know. I don't tend to type a lot on a call. Will have to ask folks next time!
Consider a separate microphone. I started using a Blue Snowball mic when I had a job making instructional videos, and stuck with it for casual videoconference use too. The audio is much clearer than a headset mic or webcam built-in mic.
Just to make it harder:
In one sense, you're writing a stream of symbols, in which the . appears strictly before or after the ".
But in another sense, you're writing something that will be typeset into a two-dimensional medium, such as a computer screen. The stream of symbols is source code that gets compiled into a visual presentation. Only part of that compilation process is under your control. You control the stream of input symbols. LessWrong's CSS styles (and the browser's defaults) control things like kerning and spacing. And the reader's GUI settings control things like subpixel antialiasing.
And, as it happens, when you write ". above and it's rendered on my screen, the dot ends up entirely beneath the quote, and when you write .", the dot is mostly beneath the quote.
This sort of thing is happening all the time.
Generations of typists were taught to use two spaces after a period; a standard that developed on monospaced typewriters. But typeset output in a proportional font almost always collapses adjacent spaces together: word spacing is not dictated by the number of space characters in the input stream. (Except where it is.)
Some writers experience frustration at seeing their "correct" double-spacing "broken" by modern typesetting. This is probably a deadweight loss of happiness; they would be better off not caring.
Sometimes, the author does need to take control of the whole typesetting pipeline, to preserve accuracy. That's why Knuth created TeX. Most writers don't have the problems that Knuth had, though.
It's possible to fit data points to an S-curve without assuming where it flattens out — but then you might not draw the limit as part of your prediction. We don't want to assume the thing can grow forever; the market saturates somewhere, even if we don't know where.
Like, if you're forecasting traffic growth for a web service, you know that there's a finite amount of human attention that can be spent on looking at web pages. It might be a lot higher than anyone expected, but it's not infinite.
See for instance Wikipedia's growth models (sadly not updated since 2015) — they started out with an exponential model and then ended up with Gompertz being much more accurate.
Yes, if you want to model growth, you probably want something like a sigmoid or Gompertz curve, whose value approaches some limit rather than rising infinitely forever.
But if you want to actually draw that curve, and use it to predict effects that you care about, you need to know what limit it approaches.
Whether that curve approaches 1 or 10^100, is going to matter a lot.
Discovering that an alien species has bred a group of humans into what a pug is to a wolf would be absolutely horrific.
This is the cynical view on agriculture.
With apologies to Kipling: Once you have paid for the yogurt, you never get rid of the yoke.