This year I was invited to give lecture to gifted high school students attending Nacionalinė moksleivių akademija. It was a great experience for me. I hope that my lecture was at least a bit useful and inspiring. You can find the slides here.

Immediately after the lecture I have remembered that have forgotten to make an important philosophical point, and to somewhat contradict the conclusion made by Veritasium in a recent video on power-law distributions.

In the video's thumbnail, one can see a claim that "working hard is not enough." I do agree with this point, but by the end of the video, one of the hosts (Casper) suggests that in a power-law world, it becomes "more important to be persistent than consistent". This interpretation is sound, and the emphasis on persistence seems both intuitive and motivating. That said, it is important to add a nuance to the discussion.

In environments governed by power laws, outcomes are often heavily influenced by chance and/or external factors. As a result, many considerable successes cannot be fully explained by individual qualities such as ability, persistence, or consistency alone. From this perspective, persistence may increase exposure to opportunities, while the ultimate magnitude of success remains strongly shaped by factors outside individual control. The point I am trying to make is well-presented in the Talent vs Luck model.

Similarly, the wealthiest agents in kinetic exchange models with savings are the ones with largest saving propensity. These agents are successful because they contribute to the shared pot the least, while having a chance at receiving an equal share of the pot back.

In an earlier post we have taken a moral formal look at the law of large numbers. But what about the intuition behind this law? I believe this video by Jeremy Blitz-Jones provides a great general level overview of the importance of this law.

Our group, along with a few students, has been reading statistics handbook and refreshing our understanding of the basic statistics. I was given to cover a chapter about the central limit theorem, which reminded me that I had already given a similar presentation while being PhD student myself. While diving into the topic, I have noticed a couple things, which are usually glanced over in a typical statistics handbook. Let me share them with you. But first, let us start simple - with the law of large numbers.

Did you know that Albert Einstein once wrote an essay titled "Why Socialism?" [1]. I did not either. Recently I have watched a YouTube video, which referred me to a video by Dr. Fatima in which a broader discussion about the essay, as well as about Physics in politics and problems faced by Palestinian physicists, can be found. Feel free to watch the video linked below, or go read the original essay [1].

My take away from both the video and the essay is an observation that in capitalist society, you can make money through owning stuff only if you pay laborers less than the value of their labor. To be fair, often the tools are what enables the labor. Yet without a laborer the tool is often as useless. Either way, such practice diverts the gains from the improving technology and other increases in productivity to the pockets of the select few instead of benefiting society as whole. The worst thing is that having deep pockets, enables the select few to exert influence over politics and shaping the society to their will. To break or circumvent check and balances that should exist in free society.

Additional note

After watching the video, reading the essay and discussing its contents with couple of different people, I have a few things to add. Now on the social media I get bombarded with low effort libertarian AI slop. Most of the time it is various AI-generated comics about how bad it was to live in the Soviet Union and how stupid young people are for trying to bring it back. Yes, they are dumb, if they are trying to bring Soviet Union in all its glory. Yet, Einstein advocates for a different thing - planned socialist economy with strong democratic safeguards.

Though I think that given the inherent economic complexity, the need to balance interests of many different groups, it would be extremely hard for any committee to produce an economic plan. "Distributed" computing of the free markets does help with this. So, one needs to look for a reasonable middle ground between the extreme ideas.

References

• A. Einstein. Why Socialism? Monthly Review 61: 55-61. doi: 10.14452/MR-061-01-2009-05_7.

In a recent video Veritasium talked about a topic close to our heart - power-law distributions! It is a neat video, which covers a lot of important models and concepts. And it also explains the implications of power-law distributions on everyday life. We invite you to watch it, and maybe revisit our posts on some of the models discussed in the video (such as The Saint Petersburg paradox, Ising model, self-organized criticality models, Barabasi-Albert model).