Collection of existing material on 'impact being heavy-tailed'

Abstract

Comment by Max_Daniel - [See this research proposal [https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/2XfiQuHrNFCyKsmuZ?commentId=XfLM87gDpr4Z7Si8C] for context. I’d appreciate pointers to other material.] [WIP, not comprehensive] Collection of existing material on ‘impact being heavy-tailed’ Conceptual foundations * Newman (2005) [https://www.piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/powerlaws80-20rule.pdf] provides a good introduction to powers laws, and reviews several mechanisms generating them, including: combinations of exponentials; inverses of quantities; random walks; the Yule process [also known as preferential attachment]; phase transitions and critical phenomena; self-organized criticality. * Terence Tao, in Benford’s law, Zipf’s law, and the Pareto distribution [https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2009/07/03/benfords-law-zipfs-law-and-the-pareto-distribution/] , offers a partial explanation for why heavy-tailed distributions are so common empirically. * Clauset et al. (2009[2007]) [https://arxiv.org/abs/0706.1062] explain why it is very difficult to empirically distinguish power laws from other heavy-tailed distributions (e.g. log-normal). In particular, seeing a roughly straight line in a log-log plot is not sufficient to identify a power law, despite such inferences being popular in the literature. Referring to power-law claims by others, they find that “the distributions for birds, books, cities, religions, wars, citations, papers, proteins, and terrorism are plausible power laws, but they are also plausible log-normals and stretched exponentials.” (p. 26) [NB on citations Golosovsky & Solomon, 2012 [https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1140/epjst/e2012-01576-4.pdf], claim to settle the question in favor of a power law - and in fact an extreme tail even heavier than that -, and they are clearly aware of the issues pointed out by Clauset et al. On the other hand, Brzezinski, 2014 [https://arxiv.org/pdf/1402