http://www.upenn.edu/pennnews/article.php?id=1035

This is the swerve you are looking for. This is what Bachelier didn’t know about motion. This is the motion of things that are self movers. When there is an asymmetry. Human beings are self movers, and this is the most basic of self movers, a tiny object that is longer in one direction than another.

Money itself needs to be smooth like Brownian motion and it is not!

People who think long term are few and far between. Also, their knowledge tends to be specialised, and therefore they have huge gaps in what they know that cause errors in judgement that you can drive a semi truck through.

If more people tried to think of long term issues and how they might impact others with decisions, they might behave differently. But all I can see right now are a lot of folks who still believe a Ptolemaic view of the world, that all centers around the ME.

When thinking of patterns like the “long tail”, it’s not about scaling, its about things like traffic jams and unthinking herd behavior. Not the prettiest aspect of our species.

I think one challenge we all wrestle with is that we’re driven to make sense of a vast, complex and rapidly-changing environment with only a very few pieces of the puzzle. Unfortunately, we don’t usually appreciate the difference between the world as modeled with our own brains and the world as it really is. So we spend more time defending our opinion rather than testing our “reality”.

That’s why I love your posts so much, even when I don’t agree with all of the current thinking. You seem to be committed to “fighting the good fight” which in my mind means being more dedicated to discerning a more perfect understanding than in touting an agenda.

Anyway, I guess this comment ended being more fan mail than substantive commentary on the issues in this post. Oh well. Maybe next time.

Cube thinks Doug, not Dusan is getting closer to the truth. The truth is, there is no “truth” and no right or wrong way to view or be in SL. There are so many different (and highly divergent) worldviews in RL that it’s impossible to understand them all. The same is true in SL, just on a smaller scale where they are more likely to collide.

I vote with Dusan, but it really doesn’t matter. As long as the search is for the right answers, there will be a lot of heads banging into walls.

page 255 of his book Sync, its an interesting read.

“For power laws hint that a system may be self organizing itself. They arise at phase transitions, when a system is poised at the brink, between order and chaos.”

Now think about geology and power laws, and then you have things like earthquakes and tsunamis.

They all look like giant waves, too.

And I can’t quite help but think that its got some relation to different sorts of Brownian motion, where the molecule has a different shape in one direction than another, skewing the behavior to high levels of nonlinearity. When we see the “long tail” we are actually seeing human behavior, not machine behavior, which I would related to looking more like a solid, much like your desktop, or perhaps better the pipes to hold the running water in your house.

Welcome to the real world, Dusan. Seems like you are starting to take the red pill Who the heck wants to have a market that looks like a rolling tsunami?! I don’t!

Thank you @Wizard for pointing out M’s flickr stream.

My basic theme is that the “war” as you call it is between the “role players” and the online realists. Second Life is a bastion of role players — which I define broadly as anyone who plays an avatar unlike their real selves, or around 80% of the population, rather than the narrow definition of RPG play. The opposite dominates Facebook which encourages people to be their real selves.

The problem is that most of the world embraces the realists, and doesn’t “get” role play. This is why Facebook has 300 million accounts and Second Life has 20 million.

So the question facing the Lindens is how to mass market a program designed for a limited audience? My answer is you can’t. Stop marketing SL as a place to make money, which only 2 to 3% manage to do, or a social gathering place, and instead market it directly at the segment of the population most likely to embrace the creative “role play” philosophy which is where the majority of the 750,000 active players come from.

I shall read it 2 times again

Best regards from France