Today I learned:

> A few notable examples of power laws are Pareto's law of income distribution, structural self-similarity of fractals, and scaling laws in biological systems.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_law#Power-law_functions

An opinionated comparison of the bell-curve and Pareto distribution:

> (1) The power law is often an empirical fact (the way things are) but not necessarily the platonic idea (the way things ought to be); and

> (2) We can tame or mitigate at least some of the negative aspects of the power law by encouraging eclectic and diverse strategies.

Tyranny of the Power Law - http://econophysics.blogspot.com/2006/07/tyranny-of-power-la...

Thanks for sharing, I enjoyed the "Tyranny of the Power Law".

Is it really a power law or just that the right half of the bell curve could pass the interview?

I've never thought about it this way. Cut off the left side of the bell, rotate the graph by 90 degrees, and you can see that the high-sigma members of the distribution take all the reward and recognition in a limited attention economy.