This article is from a couple of years ago, but I had never heard of Quanta then and so had missed it. The key argument is in the headline (and in the title of the related research (14 page PDF), 'Scale-free networks are rare'. For those who don't recall the discussions from the early 2000s, the idea of a power law is that in a dynamic and still-forming network you get 'preferential attraction', a phenomenon where new nodes link to well-established nodes, making them even more well established. 'The rich get richer', in other words. This, it was argued, is a 'natural' phenomenon of scale-free networks like (say) the internet or world financial markets. I argued against this in a presentation at Northern Voice in 2005 (that had audience members yelling at me). And, as it turns out, "the statistical tests rejected a power law as a plausible description of the network's structure" (though to be fair Erica Klarreich also caution that in this research "both proponents and critics of the scale-free paradigm see what they already believed to be true").
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