Zipf’s law states that given some corpus of natural language utterances, the frequency of any word is inversely proportional to its rank in the frequency table. Thus the most frequent word will occur approximately twice as often as the second most frequent word, three times as often as the third most frequent word, etc.

Zipf’s law (or other formulations of the same thing) govern the size of cities, and related formulations describe energy use: roughly speaking, an elephant has a lower metabolism than a mouse and is more “energy efficient”.  At that same link, we see the suggestion that creativity in large-scale environments speeds up!

The anti-pattern: how many times have we been at a conference or workshop and heard someone say (or said ourselves) “wouldn’t it be great if this energy could be sustained all year ’round?”  Or in a classroom or peer production setting, wondered why it is that everyone does not participate equally. “Wouldn’t it be great if we could increase participation?” If you believe the result above, large-scale participation would indeed tend to increase creativity! – But nevertheless, participation does tend to fall off according to some power law (see Introduction to Power Laws in The Uncertainty Principle, Volume II, Issue 3), and it would be a grand illusion to assume that everyone is coming from a similar place with regard to the various literacies and motivations that are conducive to participation. Furthermore, a “provisionist” attitude (“If we change our system we will equalize participation and access”) simply will not work in general, since power laws are inherently an epiphenomenon of networks.

Note that participation in a given activity often (but not always) falls off over time as well. This effect seems related but is also not well understood (many people would like to write a hit song / best selling novel / start a religion / etc., but few actually do).  See the anti-pattern “Magical Thinking” for more on that.

About the title: Note that those agents who do post the most in a given collaboration (respectively, the words or ideas that are most common in a given language) will tend to influence the space the most.  In this way, we can see some parallels between the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis and Bourdieu’s notion of “symbolic violence“.  Much as Paul Graham wrote about programming languages — programmers are typically “satisfied with whatever language they happen to use, because it dictates the way they think about programs” — so too are people often “satisfied” with their social environments, because these tend to dictate the way they think and act in life.