Maths Question - addition vs multiplication (1 Viewer)

[iorlas]

Afternoon all,
Hopefully right place to post this, got a quick maths question,

I'm doing work related to risk assessments, and you can use addition or multiplication to combine scores for various factors.

Anyway, what is the reason for 'multiplication being better than addition'

(going past the fact that multiplication is repeat addition) but my prof keeps going 'there is a fundamental reason for that', and i've got no idea, if I knew I wouldn't be scratching my head at it! i think we covered it at some stage, but now i've got no idea!

So yeah, any ideas?
I'm thinking it has something to do with statistics and error?
Some scales are log scales, so you add the scores, but fundamentally their multiplication... so why do we have multiplicative scales? (is that even a word? haha)

Hope someone can help!

Cheers!

 

[undalay]

Basically you're asking when to use a linear scale, and when to you a log scale?


I think log scales are numbers are large and highly varied. It's also better when values mean little by themselves and are usually used as a comparison / relative to each other.

There may be subtler reasons for using one over the other, but I am not aware of them.
I hope that helps a little : )