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Power Laws in Culture
- j2kun 3y agoThe thing about power laws is that they assert an underlying mechanism that causes the power law, but they look very close to an exponential or other long-tailed distribution, and it's not so easy to distinguish between them empirically. I recall reading a paper (but I can't find it right now) that re-evaluated a bunch of datasets that were claimed to exhibit power laws, and found that they actually were more closely aligned to an exponential distribution or other.
- timy2shoes 3y agoWas it Clauset, Shalizi, and Newman 2009? That’s the one I know, but I believe there’s many more, especially from Clauset. https://www.stat.cmu.edu/tr/tr853/tr853.pdf https://www.stat.cmu.edu/tr/tr853/tr853.pdf
- creer 3y agoIn this article, they seem to simply mean "power law-like distributions — meaning a few massive hits and a vast number of misses". ... But then they try and give two mathematical chapters in the presentation! Ugh.
- EnigmaFlare 3y agoThis kind of for-show pretend logic is aggravating. News is filled with it and people are suckers for it: predicted that the Internet would fragment attention and consumption would shift into the “tail.” But Top Gun Maverick generated over $700 million at the domestic box office last year Why is there a "but" in there? Those statements don't obviously contradict each other. You have to do some mental arithmetic to work out what proportion of the population that is, and know the price of a movie ticket and size of the population. How about just say "20% of Americans watched Top Gun Maverick"? Or better, compare it to the fragmentedness of historical movies. Maybe there's still a downward trend in popularity of hits. We're supposed to feel like we learnt something without actually having a clue.
- aaron695 3y ago[dead]