42 Laws You Should Know (Part 4)
We’re back with the fourth instalment of 42 laws worth knowing.
That makes it twenty eight down and fourteen more left to go.
For the newcomers, here are seven laws we’ve already covered in Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 to give you a flavour of what’s to come in this post:
1. Parkinson’s Law: ‘Work expands to fill the time available’.
2. Goodhart’s Law: ‘When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure’.
3. Emmett’s Law: ‘The dread of doing a task uses up more time and energy than doing it’.
4. Law of Unintended Consequences: ‘When solving one problem, we inadvertently cause others’.
5. Lindy’s Law: ‘The longer something has been around, the more likely it is to continue to be around’.
6. The Backwards Law: ‘The more you pursue something, the less likely you will achieve it’.
7. Metcalfe’s Law: ‘The value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of users’.
If you found the above ‘laws’ interesting, read on to learn about seven more.
1. Meskimen's Law:
There is never time to do it right, but there is always time to do it over.
Anyone who works in a large organisation will be familiar with this law.
The pressure to constantly demonstrate value means that action is prioritised over thinking.
Invariably, this means work is rushed in a desperate attempt to prove it's being done.
This results in the absurd situation of needing to redo it later because it was done too quickly initially.
2. Brandolini's Law
The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.
Named after the Italian programmer Alberto Brandolini, this law which is also known as the ‘bullshit asymmetry principle’ is an observation about how much easier it is to spread misinformation on the internet than it is to refute it.
It partly explains why many people get so angry on social media.
3. Law of Holes
If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.
Anyone who has ever made a social faux pas has been subject to the above law.
Learning to retreat when you’ve said something that overstepped the mark rather than ‘digging’ any deeper will save you from damaging a relationship.
4. Miller’s Law
To understand what another person is saying, you must assume that it is true and try to imagine what it could be true of.
Communication is an art.
Part of the challenge is that everything you say is open to interpretation. The other party may take something from your words that are at odds with your intended meaning.
And vice-versa.
Using Miller’s law, named after the American psychologist George Armitage Miller, helps you try on your opposite number's shoes and understand how what they’re saying could be true.
5. Murphy's Law
If there is any way to do it wrong, someone will.
Murphy’s law gets its name from the American Air Force Capt. Edward A. Murphy, a development engineer at the Wright Field Aircraft Lab.
It refers to the idea that unless you make a procedure or system bulletproof, something will go wrong.
In the case of aeronautical engineering, this could be fatal, which is why Murphy made a point of it.
For example, he knew that if it was possible to fit an aircraft part incorrectly, someone would eventually make that mistake.
This law is often misinterpreted as meaning ‘Things will always go wrong’.
6. Tesler’s Law
There is only so far you can go to simplify something.
Tesler’s Law, also known as the Law of Conservation of Complexity, states that for any system, there is a certain amount of complexity that cannot be reduced.
It’s named after Larry Tesler, an engineer at Xerox PARC, who recognised that any core complexity of an application must be assumed by either the system or the user.
In other words, there’s only so far you can go to simplify something, and any complexity left over must be taken on by somebody or something.
He argued that it was better for engineers to spend a little more time making an interface more straightforward than the users spending a lot more time trying to figure out how to use the application.
7. Sturgeon’s Law
Ninety per cent of everything is shit.
Theodore Sturgeon was a prolific writer of science fiction.
He enjoyed success as one of the most productive sci-fi authors of the fifties and sixties. All in all, Sturgeon wrote more than 100 stories.
However, not everyone was complimentary about his achievements.
Many literary critics at the time belittled him by arguing that 90% of all sci-fi books were crud.
Sturgeon responded by saying, ‘Yeah. But 90% of everything that’s published is crud, regardless of the genre.’
This observation became enshrined as ‘Sturgeon’s Law’ and you'll notice how it applies to most content.
Ninety per cent of business ideas are crap. Ninety per cent of all advertising is rubbish. And ninety per cent of social media is meaningless drivel.
