Item — HN Reader

Price's law: the square root of the population produces 50% of the trouble.

Apply that to the US (328.2 million people) and we have that 18,116 individuals are responsible for 50% of problems.

Mic drop

Wait, what? Price's Law. The square root of the number of people in a domain do 50% of the work.

Nothing about trouble.

Causing trouble is work, of sorts.

But perhaps it would be clearer if restated as, "50% of impact in a domain can be attributed to square root the number of people in that domain".

Could also be applied to community discussion, both online and in meatspace.

There is an extreme minority of people who comment and up/down vote who drive the discussion of the whole. The 99% rarely participate and just go along for the ride.

Uhhhhhhhh... the golden ratio.

Totally and like... problems are fractal in nature, you have problems within problems within problems!

It's turtles the whole way down.

And the square root of that is 135, which causes 25% of the total trouble. If we could only find these people and get rid of them, we'd have paradise on Earth!

And that's how genocides start.

20% of people are not decent human beings? Harsh.

Have you met people?

Is one person out of five that you meet causing trouble?

Keep in mind, out of 25 people, one is causing 64% of the problems while the worst four besides that one are responsible for just an additional 16%.

> out of 25 people, one is causing 64% of the problems while the worst four besides that one are responsible for just an additional 16%

Also, if you have any influence over which 20 people you spend time with, they're probably the 20 out of 25 who are not those five.

If driving on a highway is any indication, then yes

People who are shit are probably excluded from many social circles, so I don't think that's a great indicator.

If the answer is "no", it's probably you.

This seems about right, just anecdotally though.

If only we had some kind of "credit score" but for social things..

The old Accidental Black Mirror.

The episode focused only on the downsides of this idea, not the upsides. And of course they chose the worst possible implementation to make the plot more juicy. With this attitude you can make any technology look bad.

If 20% of people cause 80% of the trouble and this idea fixes that, then perhaps there is some merit in the idea even if you consider the downsides.

I'm surprised /r/UnexpectedBlackMirror doesn't exist yet.

Unlike the inquisition, everybody expects Black Mirror these days.

And it should be algorithmically driven with all sorts of fun edge cases and poor maintenance.

Edit: oh, and obviously closed source, and have it's entire db leak about once a year due to excellent security.

Nah... surely there's no way that software could mess up... people have all kinds of strange ideas, like traffic cameras looking for people using phones, and tag a guy scratching his head.... this surely is impossible to happen in real life with modern software.

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On Couchsurfing we did. The problem was that it was ultimately under the control of a small group of people, and they sold out.

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