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What Do The Wealthy, The Sun & Popular Kids Have In Common?
Let’s Get Metaphysical: Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that deals with the first principles of things, including abstract concepts such as being, knowing, substance, cause, identity, time, and space.
Introduction
What do the wealthy, the sun, and popular kids have in common, and why should you give a shit? Bravo, they attract things! They have attracted and accumulated the most information in their respective ecosystems. The sun has accumulated the most matter in the solar system; the wealthy have banked the most money in the economy; and popular kids have accumulated the most social connections. They are examples of the 80:20 rule; the 20% responsible for 80% of outcomes, and this is a recurring pattern in networked information, observable if you are paying attention. Walter Scheidel uniquely showcased the 80:20 rule in his book “The Great Leveller: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century” when he noted that within prehistoric grave sites, 20% of the dead were buried with 80% of the booty. Thus, the 80:20 rule is wildly metaphysical because it explains the distribution of information in nature and by extension who’s more likely to baseball bat someone over the head. It also explains where you shake out in the game of life, thus the meaning of life, which is why you should give a shit.
Network Science For Dummies
The United States National Research Council defines network science as “the study of network representations of physical, biological, and social phenomena leading to predictive models of these phenomena.” This predictable dimension of networked information is grounded in a few patterns. The first pattern is to collect the most goddamn points! Collecting points appears to be the underlying algorithm in the universe, therefore this is the first pattern of network science we must comprehend, friend. The second pattern is the magic that makes networked information grow: autocatalytic reactions wherein one reaction provides the fuel for the next reaction, creating a feedback loop that keeps the cycle growing. Autocatalytic reactions get very interesting with exponential growth: information can grow super-fast like a viral outbreak or compound cash-money interest: $2, $4, $8, $16, $32, $64, $128. The last pattern is all about distribution, inherent in the 80:20 rule.
To see the cycle play out, consider the early solar system: the sun began attracting matter, with the first autocatalytic reaction, which increased it’s gravitational force and gave it the strongest sphere of influence; the sun then grew exponentially, each autocatalytic reaction helping it accumulate the most matter.
Information Distribution, The 80:20 Rule
This is Jacob Moreno’s sociogram, a superb visual representation of information distributions. The circles represent students, bigger circles have more social connections, smaller circles less. Loners are dots because they have no friends, at least for now, but once they start stripping this could change. 20% of the circles are big with approximately 80% of the social connections, they win friends and influence people.
Notice how the solar system looks like Jacob Moreno’s sociogram? Where matter dictates the size of planets, social connections the size of sociogram bubbles.
Side Bar: To illustrate how this pattern plays out over extended time horizons, the sun has accumulated about 99.8% of all of the matter in the solar system.
In Conclusion
Now we know the four network science patterns 1) collect the most points, 2) autocatalytic reactions or feedback loops, 3) exponential growth, and 4) the 80:20 rule. Again, these patterns explain the goddam metaphysical laws of information distribution in nature and as we will see, where we land in the dominance hierarchies we inhabit, and by extension the meaning of life, which is why you should give a shit. Next, let us examine who’s more likely to baseball bat someone over the head.