An Open Thread: a place for things foolishly April, and other assorted discussions.
This thread is for the discussion of Less Wrong topics that have not appeared in recent posts. If a discussion gets unwieldy, celebrate by turning it into a top-level post.
Does anyone know a popular science book about, how should I put it, statistical patterns and distributions in the universe. Like, what kind of things follow normal distributions and why, why do power laws emerge everywhere, why scale-free networks all over the place, etc. etc.
Sorry for ranting instead of answering your question, but "power laws emerge everywhere" is mostly bullshit. Power laws are less ubiquitous than some experts want you to believe. And when you do see them, the underlying mechanisms are much more diverse than what these experts will suggest. They have an agenda: they want you to believe that they can solve your (biology, sociology, epidemiology, computer networks etc.) problem with their statistical mechanics toolbox. Usually they can't.
For some counterbalance, see Cosma Shalizi's work. He has many... (read more)
You could try "Ubiquity" by Mark Buchanan for the power law stuff, but it's been a while since I read it, so I can't vouch for it completely. (Confusingly, Amazon lists three books with that title and different subtitles, all by that author, all published around 2001-2002.)
An Open Thread: a place for things foolishly April, and other assorted discussions.
This thread is for the discussion of Less Wrong topics that have not appeared in recent posts. If a discussion gets unwieldy, celebrate by turning it into a top-level post.
Update: Tom McCabe has created a sub-Reddit to use for assorted discussions instead of relying on open threads. Go there for the sub-Reddit and discussion about it, and go here to vote on the idea.