42 Laws You Should Know (Part 6)
Congratulations! You’ve made it to the final post in this series.
Give yourself a pat on the back.
We hope you’ve found the information useful.
If you wish to start from the beginning, you can catch up on Part 1 and then make your way through Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 and Part 5.
Right. Let’s get on with it.
1. Littlewood's Law
Miracles happen all the time.
Have you ever been abroad and randomly bumped into someone you know? Or been desperately late for an appointment and caught a sequence of green lights that hit you there just in time?
Congratulations! You’ve experienced a ‘miracle’.
Or have you?
Littlewood's law is named after the British mathematician John Edensor Littlewood.
It states that ‘a person can expect to experience events with odds of one in a million (referred to as a "miracle") at the rate of about one per month’.
Littlewood’s Law is not proof of supernatural phenomena but a reminder that seemingly unimaginable coincidences occur much more often than you’d think when dealing with large numbers.
2. Power Laws
Non-linear relationships create exaggerated outcomes.
A power law (sometimes called the ‘scaling law’) is a term from statistics.
It refers to ‘a functional relationship between two quantities, where a relative change in one quantity results in a proportional relative change in the other quantity, independent of the initial size of those quantities: one quantity varies as a power of another.’
Don’t worry if that sounds like a bit of a mouthful. It is!
Bear with us while we try to explain it in simpler terms…
In most cases, when you add more of something, it grows in a linear fashion.
For example, if you double the number of ingredients in a recipe, you will end up with a dish twice the size.
In some cases, however, something different occurs.
Take compounding investing, for example.
In the beginning, your money grows slowly, but after a while, the speed at which it grows increases rapidly despite you not adding a proportionally similar amount of money.
That’s a power law in action!
3. Postel’s Law
Be conservative in what you send, be liberal in what you accept.
Postel’s law is named after the American computer scientist Jonathan Bruce Postel who made a significant contribution to creating the Internet.
It refers to website usability, but it contains a valuable lesson about communication in general.
When you are sending information, make sure it is clear and concise, but when you are receiving information, be open to how it is received.
E.g. If you accept file uploads, make sure they can upload any file type.
This approach is equally valid when sending emails and communicating on Slack.
Be clear and precise with your messaging, but give your colleagues the benefit of the doubt when they reply.
4. Conway’s Law
An organisation’s structure influences the type of product it produces.
In the late 1960s, the computer programmer Melvin Conway said, “Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure.”
In other words, smaller, distributed teams are more likely to create products with a modular architecture.
By contrast, a larger team under one roof is more likely to develop products with a monolithic structure.
Conway’s law is helpful because a company’s organisation chart can tell you a lot about how the company operates and how it makes decisions.
5. Gumperson’s Law
The less desirable an outcome, the more likely it is to occur.
We covered Murphy's law in an earlier post. Gumperson’s law is a variation on the same theme.
It states, "The probability of something happening is inversely proportional to its desirability."
In other words, of all the possible things that could go wrong, the thing that’s most likely to go wrong will be the thing you least want to go wrong.
If miracles happen all the time, then so seemingly do undesirable events!
6. Humphrey’s Law
The more we overthink certain things, the less good the outcome.
Humphrey's law is named after the English psychologist George Humphrey who observed that the more we consciously reflect on automatic behaviours, the more likely we are to make mistakes.
For example, a tennis player that thinks too hard about their serve. Or a golfer that reflects too much on her swing.
This psychological effect is known as hyperreflection or the ‘centipede effect’ after the short poem The Centipede's Dilemma.
7. Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics
Three things to remember to prevent the Terminator film from becoming a reality.
Ok, so we’re referring to three laws here and not one but think of the additional two as a nice bonus.
Isaac Asimov was an extraordinarily bright fellow who is considered one of the ‘Big Three’ science fiction writers, along with Robert A. Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke.
Although Asimov was referring to robots, it’s hard to ignore the relevance of his three laws in the context of artificial intelligence:
A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.
By the way, Asimov later added the "Zeroth Law" to precede the initial three: A robot may not harm humanity or, by inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.
