Episode 04: The Statistics of Surprise: Nobody expects the power law size distributions
Summary:
We dive into the strange world of power law size distributions. We warm ourselves up with an open fire of ignorance, and toast some distressing marshmallowy examples of how we don't easily understand probability. Normals are snormals and we're going places that are anything but boring. We want to find out what's behind wealth and words and earthquakes. Heavy-tailed distributions are everywhere and they quantify how big bad things can happen. We formalize power-law size distributions and make the basic connection with Zipf's law (not everyone does this).
Date:
2018/09/11
Duration:
1:30:45