Barabási:
Nature normally hates power laws. In ordinary systems all quantities follow bell curves, and correlations decay rapidly, obeying exponential laws. But all that changes if the system is forced to undergo a phase transition. Then power laws emerge-nature’s unmistakable sign that chaos is departing in favour of order. The theory of phase transitions told us loud and clear that the road from disorder to order is maintained by the powerful forces of self-organisation and is paved by power laws. It told us that power laws are not just another way of characterising a system’s behaviour. They are the patent signatures of self-organisation in complex systems.
This unique and deep meaning of power laws perhaps explains our excitement when we first spotted them on the Web. It wasn’t only that they were unprecedented and unexpected in the context of networks. It was that they lifted complex networks out of the jungle of randomness where Erdős and Rényi had placed them forty years earlier and dropped them in the colorful and conceptually rich arena of self-organization. (p77)
The power law distribution thus forces us to abandon the idea of a scale, or a characteristic node. In a continuous hierarchy there is no single node which we could pic out and claim to be characteristic of all the nodes. There is no intrinsic scale in these networks. (p.70.)
Power laws rarely emerge in systems complete dominated by a roll of the dice. Physicists have learned that most often they signal a transition from disorder to order.
Anderson:
People get Vann-Adib’s question wrong because the answer is counterintuitive in two ways. The first is we forget that the 20 percent rule in the entertainment industry is about hits, not sales of any sort. We’re stuck in a hit-driven mindset – we think that if something isn’t a hit, it won’t make money and so won’t return the cost of its production. We assume, in other words, that only hits deserve to exist. But Vann-Adib, like executives at iTunes, Amazon, and Netflix, has discovered that the “misses” usually make money, too. And because there are so many more of them, that money can add up quickly to a huge new market.
For too long we’ve been suffering the tyranny of lowest-common-denominator fare, subjected to brain-dead summer blockbusters and manufactured pop. Why? Economics. Many of our assumptions about popular taste are actually artifacts of poor supply-and-demand matching – a market response to inefficient distribution.
For too long we’ve been suffering the tyranny of lowest-common-denominator fare, subjected to brain-dead summer blockbusters and manufactured pop. Why? Economics. Many of our assumptions about popular taste are actually artifacts of poor supply-and-demand matching – a market response to inefficient distribution. [Scarcity versus abundance.]
We are stuck in a hit driven mindset – we thnk that if something isn’t a hit, it won’t make money and so won’t return the cost of its production.
The three rules:
- make everything available
- cut the price in half, now lower it
- help me find it