3 ms·

Everybody loves to credit Spolsky but you yourself know that it was in goog econsultant Hal Varian’s Information Rules (1999).. Way to doxx somebody tholol [?

• gwern 5y ago
  In keeping with Stigler's law, probably neither Spolsky nor Varian first identified the pattern; the question with these things is communication: will we communicate better this concept if we decide to throw all that out and start talking about "Yule's law" or "the Yule effect" and never say "commoditize your complement" again? Quite aside from the problem of all the things already named after Yule, the latter seems to already be familiar to many of the people who need to know it, and more satisfactory than starting over from scratch.
  • balsam 5y ago
    I am all for “C your C” but I sometimes wish that The Man would once again forget the concept (like IBM, popularly)— Since Spolsky is not quite the Man but Varian is presumed to speak for Him it is probably well to credit Varian (and Yule).. in order to remind ourselves that The Man is in on it.
    • gwern 5y ago
      Looking into it more, I'm not sure Yule should be mentioned at all. The Wikipedia link says nothing of the sort (and none of the other relevant articles do either), and I've been unable to find a single mention in G/GS of Yule and Yule-Simon distributions and complements, much less one that is so clear as to merit being called "Yule's law". He gives a 1912 date at random (is it supposed to be a reference?) but that just takes me to some obscure binary correlation coefficient which is almost-but-not-exactly an odds ratio. So I'm left wondering what Yule has to do with this at all. (And I'm a little dubious about OP's research in general after that look: as his own WP link tells you, the Gillette story is a myth so why is he repeating it, and his Apple iPod is rather thinly sourced to a search query in a book you can't read. I have not checked anything in the other laws.)