I'm sorry, but did you read the article? This is not the complaint.

If decibels were used only to measure sound relative to "experienced loudness" there would be no complaint.

The complaint is that it is used in many other ways, often without distinguishing what the base unit is.

You are bounded by a minimum floor for the hot water. Below a certain point you can get legionnaires.

To me it seems like one of two things: external pressure between hot and cold is mismatched so a small change to one side overwhelms the weaker flow.

Alternatively it might just be a broken or poor quality mixer that isn’t providing the appropriate ‘nuance’ of control, and that may indeed be expressed as some sort of non-linear relationship.

Unfortunately, people omit the quantities all the time. Domain experts assume it when talking to each other, and non-experts repeat it without knowing that it refers to anything at all. (I still don't really know what it means for a sound to have "decibels".)

You're missing a critical piece of information. Human hearing (and vision) are logarithmic sensors.

Ears can register sounds from maybe 20-30 dB upwards of 120ish which isn't a factor of 4-6 in terms of power but rather a factor of 120-30=90 decibels or 9 bels or 10^9 or one billion.

Because your ears have absolutely enormous range you need the potentiometer (pot) to have a logarithmic taper to it. The amplifier has an essentially fixed amount of amplification so that's a fixed sound dB output. Your ears can hear a vast range. A linear pot essentially locks the entire output into the same 10 decibels as the amplifier maximum output through its linearity. Once you've turned it to 10% of the range it has precisely 10 decibels worth of range left. If you want to turn the volume down by 40 decibels you have to do that within the 0-10% part of the pot's range.

A logarithmic pot will give you maybe 40-60 decibels worth of adjustment by dividing things up differently. Every 20% of the range increases the output not by 20% but by a factor of 10 let's say. That gives you a pot with a range of 50 decibels which is enough that it roughly matches the absolutely miraculous range of the ear.

"logarithmic" here refers to the number on the scale being logarithmic in the sound pressure level. Restated, power is exponential in the knob value, which roughly matches human perception of a linear increase. An actual linear function is far too slow.

The point is that sound perception is logarithmic. You perceive a 10 times stronger air vibration as twice as loud. So if you have a knob that increases the power that produces the vibrations linearly, you hear a logarithmic increase.

You need a knob that increases power exponentially to hear a linear increase in loudness.

I've actually noticed this two days ago with some bluetooth headphones and my phone.

The volume control on my android phone was acting just like this when my headphones were connected. When changing the volume with the phone only a small section of the bottom quarter of the volume control actually made a difference, but the volume controls on the headphone themselves were acting "normally".

Usually the phone volume is fine, it only screws up on bluetooth devices (my speakers + my headphones). I have to use the volume control on the device itself to have any good control.

This explains the weird behaviour, the phone volume changes are being sent linearly, but the headphone/speaker settings are correct and being set logarithmically.

i.e. somewhere a developer working on the bluetooth integration didn't understand the difference, screwed up and never tested it. That it's happening to both my Edifier speakers and my cheapo headphones probably means it's on the stock Android end (it's a pixel phone).