«Porter likes to joke that if people want to discuss something contentious, they should set aside U.S. politics and talk about power laws. But, he says, there’s a good reason these discussions are so fraught. ‘We have these arguments because the problems are hard and interesting’. Clauset sees his work with Broido not as an attack but as a call to action to network scientists, to examine a more diverse set of possible mechanisms and degree distributions than they have been doing. ‘Perhaps we should consider new ideas, as opposed to trying to force old ideas to fit’»

Source : The Theory That Explains the Structure of the Internet – The Atlantic