42 Laws You Should Know (Part 5)
We’re back for the penultimate post in this series.
You can read the individual posts in any order but if you’re the type of person who always likes to start at the beginning, then start with Part 1 and then make your way through Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.
Otherwise, let’s get started.
1. Hutber’s Law
Improvement means deterioration.
Coined by the financial journalist Patrick Hutber in the 1970s, Hutber’s law is a cynical observation about how upgrades to a service or product often result in them being worse than before.
An example of this is automated supermarket checkouts.
They are frequently out of action due to software problems and require human intervention when they go wrong. Even more annoyingly, they can’t tell if you’re of legal age to buy alcohol, so you often have to wait for an assistant.
Of course, you wouldn’t experience any of the above frustrations with a human checkout assistant!
2. Joy’s Law
No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else.
Joys law is named after Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy.
His observation refers to the fact that the knowledge base of any business is limited by the employees it has. In other words, the total extent of its knowledge can only be what its individual employees collectively know.
Why is this relevant?
Because it means that any solution to an intractable problem has to come from outside the organisation.
Hence, the smartest people (I.e. those you need to solve the problem) will be working for someone else.
3. Campbell’s Law
The more a metric counts, the greater the pressure for corruption.
Campbell’s law is named after the psychologist and social scientist Donald T. Campbell and states:
“The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.”
An example of this is standardised testing in education.
The pressure to get good results often leads to students cheating and their instructors ‘teaching to the test’.
Campbell’s law is closely related to Goodhart's law and shows that you should never underestimate the human desire to game a system.
4. Miles’s Law
Where you stand depends on where you sit.
Your view on social matters is heavily influenced by the institutions in which you live and work.
This law is named after Rufus Miles, an administrator who served under three US Presidents and observed that people's opinions and beliefs are shaped by their environments much more than they think.
5. Paco’s Law
Your spending will equal what you have available to spend.
Paco’s law isn’t an example of a law of expansion like Parkinson's law. In other words, the more you have of something more likely it is you will use it up.
Paco’s law is a truism of personal finance.
The good news is you can overcome it by creating a budget and automating your monthly savings.
Whilst we’re on the topic, you might enjoy our 10 Personal Finance Tips post.
6. Law of Narrative Gravity
The more widely known a story, the more weight it carries.
Narratives make the world go round.
Therefore, the more widely known a story is, the more likely it is to be accepted as fact.
This is why individuals and companies need to shape their own stories before someone else does.
7. Law of Prägnanz
The brain perceives and interprets ambiguous or complex images in the simplest form possible.
The human brain likes to conserve energy.
To do this, it processes the majority of information at a subconscious level.
This means when it’s faced with complex shapes or images, it will interpret them in the simplest form possible.
This has implications for anything you design, so make sure you work with this fact rather than against it.
