Controlling the Universe with Two Numbers

I stumbled across something pretty crazy recently, whilst studying a study showing the likeliness of words being used. Apparently the first, most common word to fly from our lips, is ‘the’. And it comes up a lot. But, that was pretty expected, I mean it’s kinda tough to make a sentence without it. (Except that one) So, obviously that’s not the weird part. The next word is ‘of’. And it, for some reason, is used almost perfectly half as often as the word ‘the’. And then the next word, ‘and’, is used one third as much as ‘the’. And it goes on. For all words. The number of times a word is used is always almost exactly how many times the most used is, divided by where it is in line.

Always.

And that may sound crazy, but it works. And a test conducted on every known human language had the exact same results. The same graph, the same chart. Isn’t that nuts? Every single time, words are used in that order. You’d think we’re so unpredictable, in a constantly shifting universe with constantly shifting people and motives and movements, that not a single true rule could be found in between us. And yet here it is. For some reason, we all follow it. And clearly, it’s not a conscious effort, the pattern develops just as we speak. Without any effort, it appears.

This is known as Zipf’s law, popularized by a linguist of Harvard by the name of George Zipf, and this trend has held true for, almost ever. Well, actually ever, or at least everything ever tested. And this law is repeated not only in words, but somehow, the same trend presents itself in television channels watched, and large city population, and income rankings, and corporation sizes. For some inexplicable reason, it’s everywhere.

Have you ever heard that idea that 20% of people hold 80% of the wealth? That slogan is in papers everywhere. Using this law, that statistic fits exactly. And this leads us to introduce the Pareto principle, a concept accommodating this one.

And we’re getting into math I’ll truly never comprehend here, but utilizing this slow curve of ½ to ⅓ to ¼ and so on, we can determine that the top 20% will always be worth about 80% of the whole. This, founded by economist Vilfredo Pareto, is far more applicable to today’s readers, and through SCIENCE, is shown everywhere, in all the same places as the Zipf. In business, economy, almost anything with people, even popular chess openings, it’s there. Always.

Why this is? We may never know. But one thing I will tell you for sure, those two devilish numbers, 80 and 20 will haunt me for the rest of my life. I’m gonna be seeing those in everything.