Society and Distributed Systems are similar in the sense that interesting stuff happens at the tail, and if you want to make them behave properly, you need to f

Society and Distributed Systems are similar in the sense that interesting stuff happens at the tail, and if you want to make them behave properly, you need to focus on those 1% (or 0.1% of the tail cases). For systems: queries of death, queries with highest serving latency, records with huge size compared to rest of the entries in DB, records with extremely high fan-in for your streaming pipeline, ... For society, a tiny minority of: users who would vandalize online data sets, refugees who commit terrorism / crimes, citizens committing crimes, recipients cheating welfare programs, people avoiding taxes, ... It is also the tail that imposes the maximum cost on your system / society.