Ask A Genius 143 – Pareto Distribution of Killings
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen and Rick Rosner
Publication (Outlet/Website): Ask A Genius
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2017/04/09
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Rick Rosner: Had he just been content to do that, he wanted a 1,000-year Reich. He would’ve not gotten that, but he would’ve been able to hold onto an expanded Germany that was prosperous. He could’ve been talked out of some of his terrible ideas, which included killing 11 million people he did not like. But nobody under dictatorships—there’s no mechanism for that kind of re-evaluation.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Of the people that won out in the all-time murder sweepstakes, killing sweepstakes…
RR: Yea.
SDJ: …[Laughing] This—I don’t think this has been applied to it. So I think this is a first thought, possibly. I believe you could very strongly apply a Pareto Distribution to killings. Where you have a few people at the head of directives and ideologies that drive all of this stuff, it is probably a dozen, and they dominate the landscape as if they are the Dirac, and Einstein, and Bohr, and so on, of physics, but of murder.
RR: Are you talking about the Zipf Distribution?
SDJ: Yea! So these are—for instance, Einstein, Newton, Nohr, Dirac, Feynman, Edward Witten, who are some other big people? Stephen Hawking, Stephen Weinberg, others – because I can’t think of others off the top. Some of these people are some of the most cited physicists, at least, if not scientists, ever. So they have made tremendous contributions, but the citation levels for most academics is not much. It’s probably below double-digits.
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