War Deaths Follow A Power Law

[00:00:00]If you make a crude measure of how big is a world war by how many people it kills, you find that it follows a power law.

[00:00:06]>> The outcome will vary in size over >> [music] >> 10 million, 100 million.

[00:00:11]>> It's much more likelihood of really big events than you would expect from a normal distribution, and they will totally skew the average.

[00:00:19]>> The system you're looking [music] at doesn't have any inherent physical scale.

[00:00:23]>> It's really hard to know what's going to happen next.

[00:00:25]>> The more you measure, the bigger the average is, which is really weird.

[00:00:29]It sounds impossible.

[00:00:31]>> It's It's very important to try to understand, >> [music] >> you know, which game you're playing. And what are the payoffs going to be in the in the long run?