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A challenge: find a symbolic system which does not obey a Zipfian distribution or has a heavy tail. You will fail. Programming included.
by curuinor 11y ago
A challenge: find a symbolic system which does not obey a Zipfian distribution or has a heavy tail. You will fail. Programming included.
- 6502nerdface 11y agoThere are plenty. For example, phoneme distributions and syllable distributions (as opposed to word distributions) are known not to follow Zipf's law. Are the sizes of cities and asteroids "symbolic systems"? Anyway, my point (consistent with yours in fact) is simply that the shape of the income distribution should not be so surprising, or strike us as "unnatural", given how often we observe the same shape of distribution for all kinds of things, both in economics and in the natural world.