

The social meaning of the power law - Perceval
http://thememorybank.co.uk/2010/02/01/the-social-meaning-of-the-power-law/

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Perceval
I found this article when searching for information on statistical methods
based on power laws. I've been trying to find information on non-Gaussian
statistics, but having a difficult time making my way by myself. I even bought
a book of non-parametric statistical methods, but even those ended up using
z-scores based on a normal distribution when dealing with large samples.

While the blog post is a bit airy, I appreciate its point that the social
sciences in particular are more accurately described by power laws than by the
bell curve.

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elblanco
Yeah, this was a really interesting read. In my experience, power-law
distributions seem to more accurately describe more of the world than bell-
curves. Yet we seem to have better tools for working with bell curves (at
least in my highly limited experience working with statistics).

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Perceval
Nassim Nicholas Taleb's books ( _Fooled by Randomness_ and _The Black Swan_ )
make the point that power laws are better at describing how uncertain the
world we live in is, rather than making uncertainty and risk tractable in the
way that the bell curve models.

The properties of the bell curve are well known, and therefore easier to
perform statistical tests with, whereas the many stable power law
distributions are harder to deal with and more difficult to simply assume.

~~~
elblanco
I'm curious, on a biological level, if this is one of the assumptions our
sensory and cognitive systems make to filter out lots of noise and find
patterns.

