Power Laws in Culture(dougshapiro.medium.com)
dougshapiro.medium.com
Power Laws in Culture
https://dougshapiro.medium.com/power-laws-in-culture-27ab6461c693
7 comments
The 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.
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.
Was 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
In 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.
But then they try and give two mathematical chapters in the presentation! Ugh.
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.