Power Distributions and Sturgeon's Law

The most interesting part of the readings this week about scale-free networks for me was the possible relationship with Sturgeon's Law. Basically, Sturgeon's Law is the "rule" proposed by a science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon that ninety percent of everything is crud (for further reading, wiki link). There are two potentially interesting applications of this to scale-free networks and distributions. The main idea of the law, that ninety percent of anything (music, books, science fiction, food) is terrible and ten percent is passable or better, could effectively neuter some of the effects of luck on scale-free distribution. If the vast majority is poor to start with, those that are poor but have the capacity to get richer (those that aren't terrible in the words of the law) can potentially have a leg up to bypass others on their way to the top. Thus, eventually the rich will be the "deserving" people.

The other application is slightly less optimistic in its view. Consider the possibility that the "cruddiness" of everything is inherent in the scale-free network. That is, the intrinsic quality of a product has such a low impact that ninety percent of even the most popular slice of anything is also terrible. Personally this idea seems more likely to me, especially when we look at movie and book sales. Some books (cough Twilight/Eragon cough) are terrible, yet are in the top ten percent of success, and the same goes for movies (cough Transformers 2 cough). What matters is not the actual quality of something when it comes to success but the position of the owner of the property within the network. This effect may fade with age, however, considering how many of the "best" composers have become successful after their lifetimes when their networks have completely fallen apart, so there may be hope yet for the best of the best regardless of the way the law and networks are related.