The Greasy Pole Updated

The Greasy Pole was meant light-heartedly, but it got a couple of interesting people seriously interested.

First, Dennis Des Chene tried to model how citations tend to get magnified; then Tony Chemero chimed in saying how power law distributions provide a rich ground for speculation in cognitive science. In the meanwhile, Eric Schliesser reminded us how important Pareto distributions are in the economics of wealth distribution: it's the Matthew principle referred to by Dennis. (The rich get richer.)

As Dennis realized, these kinds of statistical distributions betoken underlying interactions, and Tony says that they can thus provide an argument against modularity in domains where they occur. He provides a reference to a terrific review article on non-Gaussian scaling laws by Christopher Kello et al: there's a link in comment 11 of my post. Kello et al. write:

Measurements of living systems often obey scaling laws rather than linear relations or Gaussian statistics. Bringing order to such regularities, which are inherent in nature’s complexities, including the complexities of cognition, has proven to be as difficult as bringing order to randomness.