Zeros And Ones

If you’ve never heard of Benford’s Law, it’s worth reading about this nifty statistical fact. The gist is that for certain types of data sets, the frequency of the leading digit follows a predictable pattern (with 1 being the most frequent by far). I decided to put it to the test by analyzing the total view counts for each post on this blog.

Leading Digit	Actual Rate	Predicted Rate
1	31.3%	30.1%
2	27.7%	17.6%
3	17.5%	12.5%
4	7.8%	9.7%
5	5.4%	7.9%
6	2.4%	6.7%
7	1.2%	5.8%
8	4.2%	5.1%
9	2.4%	4.6%

I guess that’s why they call it a law, because the actual digit rates match up pretty well.

Speaking of which, apparently I also have a thing for named laws. If you do too, the article is worth it for this side note:

The fact that things are often named for someone who didn’t discover it first is common. In fact, there is a name for this, Stigler’s Law of Eponymy. It was proposed by the American statistics professor Stephen Stigler in 1980 when he wrote that no scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer. In an ironic twist, Stigler acknowledged that the American sociologist Robert Merton had previously discovered “Stigler’s Law”.