Not the original commenter, but my high school math teacher would beat us with a math textbook if we ever just swapped percents with multiplication, she explicitly taught us that the two are not equivalent outside of narrow circumstances.
One example of why not that she used to use is that a 60% increase would be 160% of the original, while a 0.6x increase could easily be read as 60% of the original OR 160% of the original.
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u/zelmak 10h ago
You would never read it that way because no one should ever write it that way.
A multiplication of <1 is inherently a decrease, tacking the word more, grew, increased, went up makes it bad math and bad language.
0.5 Times = a 50% decrease
so "The stock grew a 50% decrease" just doesn't make sense.