13 chunks · 13 episodes
Whether or not something is in extremistan: does it have a preferential attachment effect or not? Preferential attachment is multiplicative vs additive.
...mal distributions. Extremistan: power law distributions. Any mechanism that has preferential attachment is by definition Extremistan. The Extremistan power law is called a log normal. A power law implies scale free, which implies fractal behavior. At th...
...gravity. Gravity shows up in physics and also in many emergent phenomena due to preferential attachment. When a system has gotten to its late stage, it's consolidated. It's a kind of heat death. But a lot of interesting things can happen before that con...
... to decide which options get the most attention. One of the reasons it works is preferential attachment: the options that are already popular are more likely to be shown as options to other people and thus get even more popular. The test is not "Do you ...
Vibecoding will lock in today's popular libraries. There's already a preferential attachment effect for libraries that are popular today. All else equal, it makes sense to use the thing that others are already using. There's more likely to be...
... industries. For example, winner-take-all dynamics show up because the force of preferential attachment, a weak minor force in atoms-based industries, becomes an inescapable, all-powerful gravity well in bits-based industries.
...ggregation always happens in every system over sufficiently long time horizons. Preferential attachment is a kind of emergent law of the universe, like the inverse of entropy, a thing that shows up inescapably. When evolving an ecosystem, if you don't d...
...tives. The bigger it gets, the more obviously it is too big to fail, making the preferential attachment effect stronger. "Yeah, it's possible that [TBTF bank] goes down… but if they do, we're all screwed"
...tend to accumulate more data in than they emit out. This leads to a significant preferential attachment effect, where the biggest apps tend to get even bigger. As a pocket universe gets more mass, it attracts ever more mass. The same origin model is wha...
...ation is like pushing a rock up a hill. You have to fight the law of gravity of preferential attachment and efficiency. So do it once you have momentum.
...tic, diffuse baseline. Folksonomies typically work because the UI adds optional preferential attachment. That is, users can optionally choose to adopt someone else's idea. Concretely, this means that when you create a new tag, it first shows you a searc...
...ly decentralized. Most systems, with more use, tend to become more centralized. Preferential attachment effects mean that people simply use the thing everyone else uses. What if you could design a system that was the opposite? Decentralization is extrem...
...his dynamic is, I think, inevitable in some sense. Yet another example of where preferential attachment and the asymmetric advantage of the swarm plays out. That said, I think you can design systems that slow its advance… or periodically reset the world...