Weak and strong orders of magnitude
Posted: Thu Feb 19, 2026 7:21 pm
Just some random musing that came to mind that I don't think I've ever shared 
Everyone has some vague idea for what "order of magnitude" means. Informally, and also somewhat formally, "by an order of magnitude" means "ten times more". So 10² is one order of magnitude smaller than 10³, and so on...
But I once heard someone, I forgot who it was, who said something along the lines of: "When tweaking values, it's often better to shift things by a weak order of magnitude", and by "weak order of magnitude", they meant powers of two: so instead of multiplying/dividing by 10, it's multiplying/dividing by 2.
This is a silly thing, but over the years that idea stuck with me, and it really works. Say you start a character controller in godot, give it a speed of 100 (godot uses pixels per second) and feel it's not enough. I often try 1000 next, adding a zero is easy, right? But life has taught me when my gut feel wants to add a zero, what I'm actually looking for is doubling the quantity, so the speed of 200 (or sometimes double it twice, at 400) feels just right, whereas adding an actual order of magnitude is almost always too much unless I was waaaaaaay off. This is even more important for magnitudes that have quadratic effects, like a character's acceleration.
Anyway, silly concept, but this has happened again for the who-knows-how-many-th time and I thought I'd share ^^
Everyone has some vague idea for what "order of magnitude" means. Informally, and also somewhat formally, "by an order of magnitude" means "ten times more". So 10² is one order of magnitude smaller than 10³, and so on...
But I once heard someone, I forgot who it was, who said something along the lines of: "When tweaking values, it's often better to shift things by a weak order of magnitude", and by "weak order of magnitude", they meant powers of two: so instead of multiplying/dividing by 10, it's multiplying/dividing by 2.
This is a silly thing, but over the years that idea stuck with me, and it really works. Say you start a character controller in godot, give it a speed of 100 (godot uses pixels per second) and feel it's not enough. I often try 1000 next, adding a zero is easy, right? But life has taught me when my gut feel wants to add a zero, what I'm actually looking for is doubling the quantity, so the speed of 200 (or sometimes double it twice, at 400) feels just right, whereas adding an actual order of magnitude is almost always too much unless I was waaaaaaay off. This is even more important for magnitudes that have quadratic effects, like a character's acceleration.
Anyway, silly concept, but this has happened again for the who-knows-how-many-th time and I thought I'd share ^^
