It's Distributions All The Way Down!

The textual, big-data literature misses Bentley, O’Brien, & Brock’s (Bentley et al.’s) message on distributions; it largely examines the first-order effects of how a single, signature distribution can predict population behaviour, neglecting second- order effects involving distributional shifts, either between signature distributions or within a given signature distribution. Indeed, Bentley et al. themselves under-emphasise the potential richness of the latter, within-distribution effects.