I've been thinking about bell curves Order clomid without prescription, vs. power laws. Clomid online stores, And modes of veridiction. In part this comes from a question: if the figure of biopower is associated with probablistic reasoning about populations, does it matter what kind of probablistic reasoning, kjøpe clomid online.
The bell curve and the power law are two forms of statistical distribution, Michigan MI Mich. , but with very different characteristics and assumptions about the world. The first, ubiquitous and familiar, presumes a normal distribution with an average and median that coincide (i.e, order clomid without prescription. the most common number and the middle number in the distribution are the same), and which considers extremes to be increasingly unlikely (thus the bell shape), Alaska AK . The latter, Køb billige clomid, which has gotten a lot of attention in the last 6 or so years (but which has been a subject of study since about the 1960s, earlier if you include Pareto's observations on income distribution), presumes a distribution that is not bell shaped, buy clomid no prescription, but has a steep decline and a long tail. Lowest price clomid, Average and median do not coincide, and extremes are just as likely as everything else, thus:
The power law (also called the 80/20 law and the law of scale-invariant networks) has been most visibly remarked on recently to describe aspects of traffic on the Internet, Montana MT Mont. . Wikipedia, New Mexico NM N.Mex. , for instance, is described by many (e.g. Order clomid without prescription, Clay Shirky, Yochai Benkler and others) as obeying a power law: 20% of its contributors produce 80% of its content. Even more specifically, order clomid, the top contributor produces twice as much content as the second-best contributor who produces almost twice as much as the third and so on. New Jersey NJ N.J. , Another recent use is the "Long Tail" of Chris Anderson, who applied it to markets for books (and other products) where 20% of the books account for 80% of the sales (his point was that there was money to be made on the other 80%, because it was represented a lot of small sales of obscure or out of print books), District of Columbia DC D.C. . It's also part of Kleiber's law (that the metabolism and the size of an organism are related by the power law). Buy clomid online without prescription, The wikipedia entry for Power Law lists a nice little article from Forbes, by Benoit Mandelbrot (Mr. Fractal, who I now think of as the Francis Galton of power-law thinking) about how financial risk is all wrong if we apply bell curve thinking instead of power-law thinking, order clomid without prescription. The implication being that huge swings in the market (big gains and big losses) are just as likely to occur as small steps, Arizona AZ Ariz. . The Bell Curve presumes that huge changes are increasingly infrequent the larger they are; the power law, Køb discount clomid, by contrast, suggests that huge changes and small changes are related by the 80/20 law (80% of changes come from 20% of the events, rather than from 80%), billige clomid Apotheke. This naturally has pretty huge implications for how we think about risk. Kjøp Discount clomid, The reason I think this is interesting is that it represents two different ways of thinking about normalization and the regime of veridiction implied by statistical reasoning. Order clomid without prescription, Rabinow and Bennett's diagnostic doesn't make this distinction, at least not with respect to regimes of veridiction (they use metrics of normalization, dignity and flourishing, to which correspond differences in kind-- probablistic, archonic and emergent). The Power law suggests that at least some kinds of statistical normalization can be seen in very different ways. Granted they rely on many of the same technologies and assumptions about individual humans and populations, clomid generic, but they produce different lessons, Comprare clomid sconto, or different plans of action--maybe even an alternative mode of veridiction.
So, applied to something like disease, Florida FL Fla. , for instance, Missouri MO Mo. , the power law counsels very different kinds of surveillance and intervention, treating obscure and deadly diseases such as ebola with as much resources and concern as ubiquitous ones like malaria and influenza. Similarly in the governance of finance or of terrorism.., cheap clomid tablets. it suggests spending resouces on the small groups that cause the biggest events, rather than the mass of everyday small events, order clomid without prescription. In a weird way, Order clomid online legally, this is consistent with, for instance, the way (some of) the media covers news (80% of news is only 20% of the events), cheap generic clomid. I'm not sure what to make of this, Iowa IA , but perhaps the salient research question is: how do people, institutions, powerful folks decide whether to believe the Power Law instead of The Bell Curve. And with what implications.
As far as synthetic biology, nanotech and biosecurity goes, I suspect that there is a kind of hidden dispute going on here: some scientists (mostly social scientists, I suspect) hew to the bell curve when analyzing risk and responsibility and the promise of returns from a new technology. Others (the natural scientists and engineers, I suspect) hew to the power law because it warrants promises of big returns from small investments (whether money or knowledge) and because it warrants a certain kind of thinking about risk:that 80% of risk is from 20% of activities, thus we should pay more attention to extreme events like terrorism and out of control pathogens than everyday risks like peanut butter and cancerous pesticides. Obviously there are some fuzzy lines here, but in the interests of clarity: are these two modes both features of the figure of bio-politics, or should we reserve the bell curve form biopolitics and assign the power law to some other figure.
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Thanks for this Chris. Just quickly, I think that this broad question — without the specific distinction between the Bell curve and the Power curve — has been a major theme of the entire VSS collaboration. Put the other way around: These curves present a nice formalization of a distinction that we have been examining in many, many ways. Consider, for example, Lyle’s stuff on syndromics, and the conflicts between the preparedness types (Power curve) and public health professionals (Bell curve). Andy’s article “From Population to Vital System” is very much about these two ways of reasoning about risk — an emphasis on relatively rare events that account for most of the harm as opposed to normal events in the sense that you describe. We talk about this distinction in the introduction to Biosecurity Interventions in a number of different contexts.
One question you raise is: How are conflicts between these two modes adjudicated? One kind of answer is clearly political. Another is technical — which is what I describe in my Enactment piece. For example, how is an insurential technology that deals with relatively rare events that will account for most losses are inscribed into a regime of regular and predictable losses? One answer is reinsurance.
Another question is what this has to do with biopolitics. Andy and I have been back and forth on this a lot with respect to the distinction between population security (Bell curve) and VSS (Power curve). I think we have come to agree that in fact VSS is very much a “biopolitical” technology. I personally tend to want to distinguish between “population security” and “biopolitics.” The former being one “biopolitical” technology of power, but not the only one.
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yes, agreed… I think the comparison makes sense to me only because of the work you guys have done already. I guess to push it farther, I would highlight the hyper-enthusiasm shown for the Power Law by folks attempting to explain the Internet. There are number of these network-style concepts that have suddenly moved from arcane academic debates to ubiquitous common-sense descriptions. The small-world phenomenon is one (six degrees of separation); power laws and scale-free networks are another. I noticed early on in my work the obsession people have with “scalablity” when describing the Internet. I guess I’m grasping for a way to characterize the emergece of this new common sense which is by no means post-probabalistic or post-biopolitical, but rather a different way of grasping and making sense of mass society, statistically and probabalistically. And it is rapidly becoming a kind of common sense *because* of the experience with the Internet (and not, I think, because of emerging diseases, global health or terrorism).
A somewhat goofy confirmation of this for me was the conference that some of my students at Harvard organized last year called ROFLcon which was focused on the nature and meaning of internet memes and especially internet celebrity. This is a generation that is moving from subcultures (goth, punk etc) to power law-like “micro”-celebrity, or winner-takes all phenomena (Star Wars Kid, The Tron Guy, LolCats, and so forth) as a standard feature of life. Despite having sat through the whole conference, I still don’t know what this means, but I’m loathe to dismiss it.
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Thanks for posting this, Chris. Its intriguing to reflect on how many of our projects do seem to be raising similar questions around the limits or mutations of probabalism. My paper at Santa Cruz on Monte Carlo in syndromic surveillance was another effort to think through what happens when probability techniques are used to discover ‘events’ rather than regularities. I agree with both you and Stephen that the relationship to the ‘figure of biopower’ is not straightforward: as Chris put its, the object is often the same (populations) but the form given to these populations, and the implications for knowledge and government, are often very different.
To slightly extend the question, another ‘mutation’ brought up a few months ago on VSS by Onur is the increasing use of ‘social network analysis’ (and I would add, specifically its increasing mathematization).
http://anthropos-lab.net/vss/2008/10/network-analysis-diseasepopulation-control/
Onur argued that social network analysis (in epidemiology, for example) involves a “reproblematization of ‘population’ as an ontological being under a new and novel form different from its 19th century understanding”. Thus, rather than mapping pathology onto space, mileu, or social environment (see French Modern) through normalized correlations, the epidemic in a population is mapped as a series of quantifiable relationships. Much SARS research, for example, utilizes network analysis to locate pivotal nodes in which infection was maximized (i.e. superspreaders) rather than correlations with “conditions of life”. One implication is that quarantine and isolation are seen as key control mechanisms, rather than interventions in “the social”.