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Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 22, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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This is a wild guess. But my intuition is that:

Let's model a system as follows.

  • There exists a space where multiple agents have to compete for some finite and some infinite resources.

  • Some of these agents spawn stochastically.

  • Agents can grow and die. (Assume some randomness here too)

  • Agents can destroy other agents and absorb them.

  • Agents have some kind of gravitational field, where a larger size is a competitive advantage.

  • The above feature ensures power law distributed size.

Leading to; In a large system, given enough time; Certain agents can gather such 'mass' that they just immediately kill or absorb any new agents that pop up. And they are disproportionately harder to fight against as time goes on.

Think monopolies, think mainstream culture, think religions. The system I intuited above can describe memetic systems at a certain level of abstraction.