You've (Likely) Been Playing The Game Of Life Wrong

Veritasium · 11.6M views · 2025-11-26 · 45:13

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Overview

Veritasium explains why many real-world systems follow power laws rather than normal distributions. It covers self-organized criticality, with simulations of sandpiles, magnetism and forest fires.

On Hacker News

HN commenters recommend it for changing how they think about distributions and for showing how criticality shows up across earthquakes, wildfires and other fields.

Recommended by 4 HN people across 3 months · HN mentions 2025–2026

Topics

Everyday physics & science demos Data science & statistics Scientific method & science communication

What people said

gopalv · 2026-08 · Recommendation
Your success eV is opportunities x success-rate. Out of the gate, hard work improves success rates, but not the count of opportunities. Connections improve opportunities, it doesn't do shit for success-rate. Luck does for both sides of the mix. As a startup founder in my 40s, the entire VP/SVP level in silicon valley is people one or two hops away for an intro, though admittedly a lot of the first hop there is through the other founders. The original paper about importance of weak ties is under appreciated, because people you work with tend to go on to better & bigger things - especially in the beginning of your career, if you are a nice person. Veritasium put out a very nice video[1] about knowing which sort of game we're playing. It is a power law game. There are only two takeaways I had, "show up" and "get lucky". There is no winning without showing up. [1] - [VIDEO]
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kjshsh123 · 2026-02 · Recommendation
3Blue1Brown has a good video on phase transitions. [LINK] Veritasium has a good video on how criticality applies to other things too, [VIDEO]
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indigodaddy · 2025-12 · Recommendation
Various scientists in this video. The video is a great watch btw. [VIDEO] (stresses build up and are often released through many small, unfelt earthquakes (25:54). If these small movements don't dissipate the stress, it can accumulate and lead to a powerful chain reaction (26:25) * disclaimer I used YouTube's built-in AI to find/summarize the timestamps, as I couldn't remember offhand where it was when I previously watched this.
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Sources

Video by Veritasium, played through YouTube.

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Data and selection notes

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