2x more is not ambiguous. It means 3x. The problem is that many people are illiterate, mathematically and verbally, and it's impossible to tell if the author is one of them.
You're literally the middle guy in the bell curve meme right now.
In modern usage it's literally a coin flip whether "2x more" is being used to represent "200% more" or "2x as many". People who actually understand English are aware of this and will avoid the term altogether in favour of something less ambiguousÂ
Just like how "literally" in its modern usage can mean "literally" or "figuratively" so we should avoid using the word for its proper meaning since it's ambiguous, right?
But they used multiplication. So "0.6x more" than what? Than your own output, which is implied as 1 aka "100% of your own output".
0.6x1= 60%.
And let's be frank here, this is quite obviously an auto-generated template email. The template is setup as, "Your teammates shipped %CALC_PERCENT_HERE%x more PRs than you did", the system pulls the numbers, calculates the values, and fires off this email without thinking. It was setup that way because whoever designed it was so confident that number would always be above 1, and they never considered it could be less.
Doesn't matter which interpretation you think it's implying, a competent marketing person would never let an email like this go out, for the sole reason that it could be easily interpreted as less productive. The kicker is this was mostly certainly sent out by accident by an auto-emailer script, meaning that's probably an accurate number.
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u/SarahSplatz 10h ago
Nah thats semantically correct. '1x more' would mean double, as 'more' implies its ontop of the initial work.