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Cosma has a PowerPoint that may be more accessible to a general audience: https://www.stat.cmu.edu/~cshalizi/2010-10-18-Meetup.pdf https://www.stat.cmu.edu/~cs

• PaulHoule 2y ago
  Exactly, the thing that is "universal" about "universal power laws" is that the evidence is weak for them, not because people did a bad experiment, but because they pulled a data analysis method out of their ass. My one regret of my scientific career was this paper https://arxiv.org/abs/cond-mat/9512055 https://arxiv.org/abs/cond-mat/9512055 where my coauthor asked me "you want to be a theoretician, do you have an explanation?" but I didn't. (I did have some ideas that would have involved knowing more about the structure of the balls, doing more experiments, to give any real answer) Actually I had reservations about the analysis method (got different answers trying two reasonable things that I saw other people to do), it would have been a good paper had I actually addressed the tension but the coworker didn't want to go there. Another interesting thing about my paper was that segmentation was a problem as it was in that Science paper, I didn't do anywhere near the level of sensitivity analysis, but I could have gotten different answers if I'd defined integration windows around the pops differently. Probably the very loud pops also had echos, oh my god that problem was so bad when I tried to do the crumpling in an ordinary room and worse when I made my own small 'soundproof' box, it was better in the anechoic chamber I took the real measurements in. The mystery of explaining the universality is greatly diminished when you can throw out a large number of the papers though...