„This list of eponymous laws provides links to articles on laws, principles, adages, and other succinct observations or predictions named after a person.“
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_eponymous_laws
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford%27s_law_of_controversy
„Passion is inversely proportional to the amount of real information available.“
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law
„The amount of energy needed to refute a lie is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.“
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Briffault%27s_law
„The female, not the male, determines all the conditions of the animal family. Where the female can derive no benefit from association with the male, no such association takes place.“
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Campbell%27s_law
„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.“
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chesterton%27s_fence
„reforms should not be made until the reasoning behind the existing state of affairs is understood.“
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws: Third
„Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.“
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_Cunningham#Cunningham’s_Law
„The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question, but to post the wrong answer.“
Curmudgeon’s Dictum
„The average intelligence of a group is proportional to the number of members up to ‘n’ and inversely proportional to the number of members minus ‘n’ above that, where ‘n’ is a small constant dependent on the species of the group. For humans, ‘n’ seems to be in the range of 6 to 8.“
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dilbert_principle
„the most ineffective workers are systematically moved to the place where they can do the least damage: management.”“
„which states that companies tend to systematically promote incompetent employees to management to get them out of the workflow“
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number
„is a theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. No precise value has been proposed for Dunbar’s number, but a commonly cited approximation is 150.“
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect
„is a cognitive bias in which unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly rating their below-average ability as higher than average. This bias is attributed to a metacognitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their ineptitude.“
„some theorists do not restrict it to the bias of people with low skill, also discussing the reverse effect, i.e., the tendency of highly skilled people to underestimate their abilities relative to the abilities of others.“
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engelbart%27s_law
„The intrinsic rate of human performance is exponential.“
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finagle%27s_law
Anything that can go wrong, will—at the worst possible moment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gall%27s_law
„A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked.“
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gause%27s_law
„the competitive exclusion principle: “complete competitors cannot coexist.”“
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect
„Believing newspaper articles outside one’s area of expertise, even after acknowledging that neighboring articles in one’s area of expertise are completely wrong.“
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#GellMannAmnesiaEffect
„Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
That is the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. I’d point out it does not operate in other arenas of life. In ordinary life, if somebody consistently exaggerates or lies to you, you soon discount everything they say. In court, there is the legal doctrine of falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, which means untruthful in one part, untruthful in all. But when it comes to the media, we believe against evidence that it is probably worth our time to read other parts of the paper. When, in fact, it almost certainly isn’t. The only possible explanation for our behavior is amnesia.“
„The Gell-Mann amnesia effect is similar to Erwin Knoll’s law of media accuracy, which states: “Everything you read in the newspapers is absolutely true except for the rare story of which you happen to have firsthand knowledge.”“
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law
„As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.“
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
„When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.“
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor
„never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity“
„”Do not invoke conspiracy as explanation when ignorance and incompetence will suffice, as conspiracy implies intelligence.“
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitchens%27s_razor
„What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence.“
„the burden of proof regarding the truthfulness of a claim lies with the one who makes the claim; if this burden is not met, then the claim is unfounded, and its opponents need not argue further in order to dismiss it.“
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hofstadter%27s_law
„It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s law“
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humphrey%27s_law
„conscious attention to a task normally performed automatically can impair its performance“
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
„Increasing the efficiency with which a resource is used increases the usage of that resource.“
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joy%27s_law_(management)
„no matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else“
„The law highlights an essential problem that is faced by many modern businesses, “that in any given sphere of activity most of the pertinent knowledge will reside outside the boundaries of any one organization, and the central challenge [is] to find ways to access that knowledge.”“
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Littlewood%27s_law
„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.“
„Accepting this definition of a miracle, one can expect to observe one miraculous event for every 35 days’ time, on average – and therefore, according to this reasoning, seemingly miraculous events are actually commonplace.“
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller%27s_law
„In communication“: „in order to understand what someone is telling you, it is necessary for you to assume the person is being truthful, then imagine what could be true about it.“
„In psychology“: „the number of objects an average person can hold in working memory is about seven, also known as The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two.“
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry%27s_law
„If you write anything criticizing editing or proofreading, there will be a fault of some kind in what you have written.” The name is a deliberate misspelling of “Murphy’s law”.“
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murphy%27s_law
„Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.“
„According to Robert Murphy’s account, his father’s statement was along the lines of “If there’s more than one way to do a job, and one of those ways will result in disaster, then he will do it that way.”“
„In 1948, humorist Paul Jennings coined the term resistentialism, a jocular play on resistance and existentialism, to describe “seemingly spiteful behavior manifested by inanimate objects”, where objects that cause problems (like lost keys or a runaway bouncy ball) are said to exhibit a high degree of malice toward humans.“
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton%27s_flaming_laser_sword
„What cannot be settled by experiment is not worth debating.“
„Eventually I concluded that language was bigger than the universe, that it was possible to talk about things in the same sentence which could not both be found in the real world.“
„Alder admits, however, that “While the Newtonian insistence on ensuring that any statement is testable by observation … undoubtedly cuts out the crap, it also seems to cut out almost everything else as well.”“
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor
„explanations should never multiply causes without necessity. (“Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.”) When two or more explanations are offered for a phenomenon, the simplest full explanation is preferable.“
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okrent%27s_law
„The pursuit of balance can create imbalance because sometimes something is true”, referring to the phenomenon of the press providing legitimacy to unsupported fringe viewpoints in an effort to appear even-handed.“
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papert%27s_principle
“Some of the most crucial steps in mental growth are based not simply on acquiring new skills, but on acquiring new administrative ways to use what one already knows.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle
„for many phenomena 80% of consequences stem from 20% of the causes.“
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law
„work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion“
„He explained this growth using two forces: (1) “An official wants to multiply subordinates, not rivals,” and (2) “Officials make work for each other.” He noted that the number employed in a bureaucracy rose by 5–7% per year “irrespective of any variation in the amount of work (if any) to be done.”“
„Stock–Sanford corollary to Parkinson’s law:
If you wait until the last minute, it only takes a minute to do.“
„The law can be generalized further as:
The demand upon a resource tends to expand to match the supply of the resource (If the price is zero).“
„Parkinson’s conjecture that membership exceeding a number “between 19.9 and 22.4” makes a committee manifestly inefficient seems well justified by the evidence proposed. Less certain is the optimal number of members, which must lie between three (a logical minimum) and 20. (Within a group of 20, individual discussions may occur, diluting the power of the leader.)“
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law_of_triviality
„The time spent on any agenda item will be in inverse proportion to the sum of money involved.“
„argument that people within an organization commonly or typically give disproportionate weight to trivial issues.“
„The law of triviality is supported by behavioural research. People tend to spend more time on small decisions than they should, and less time on big decisions than they should. A simple explanation is that during the process of making a decision, one has to assess whether enough information has been collected to make the decision. If people make mistakes about whether they have enough information, they will tend to stop too early for big decisions. The reason is that big decisions require collecting information for a long time. It leaves more time to make a mistake (and stop) before getting enough information. Conversely, for small decisions, where people should stop early, they may continue to ponder for too long by mistake.“
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peltzman_effect
„Risk compensation is a theory which suggests that people typically adjust their behavior in response to perceived levels of risk, becoming more careful where they sense greater risk and less careful if they feel more protected. Although usually small in comparison to the fundamental benefits of safety interventions, it may result in a lower net benefit than expected.“
„The Peltzman effect can also result in a redistributing effect where the consequences of risky behaviour are increasingly felt by innocent parties (see moral hazard). By way of example, if a risk-tolerant driver responds to driver-safety interventions, such as compulsory seat belts, crumple zones, ABS etc. by driving faster with less attention, then this can result in increases in injuries and deaths to pedestrians.“
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle
„In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.“
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postel%27s_law
„Be conservative in what you do; be liberal in what you accept from others.“
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pournelle%27s_iron_law_of_bureaucracy
„In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals that the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely.“
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Premack%27s_principle
„more probable behaviors will reinforce less probable behaviors.“
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Putt%27s_Law_and_the_Successful_Technocrat
„Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand.“
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pygmalion_effect
„also known as the Pygmalion effect“
„Higher expectations lead to an increase in performance, or low expectations lead to a decrease in performance.“
Rothbard’s law
„Everyone specializes in his own area of weakness“
„People tend to specialise in what they’re worst at.“
„But Rothbard seems to have had a different problem in mind: if a talent has always come naturally – or if it’s been decades since you last found it difficult – you conclude that it’s nothing special. And so, in your efforts to achieve something impressive, or to gain a feeling of accomplishment, you gravitate toward whatever it is you can’t do. You stride out into exactly those fresh pastures in which you shouldn’t be setting foot.“
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/jul/27/change-your-life-rothbards-law
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagan_standard
„extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence“
„Thomas Jefferson said “A thousand phenomena present themselves daily which we cannot explain, but where facts are suggested, bearing no analogy with the laws of nature as yet known to us, their verity needs proofs proportioned to their difficulty.”“
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre%27s_law
„In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake.“
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Segal%27s_law
„A man with a watch knows what time it is. A man with two watches is never sure.“
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clay_Shirky#Shirky_principle
„Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution“
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sod%27s_law
„This would broaden Sod’s law to a general sense of being “mocked by fate”.“
„Sod’s law is a more extreme version of Murphy’s law. While Murphy’s law says that anything that can go wrong, will go wrong (eventually), Sod’s law requires that it always goes wrong with the worst possible outcome. Hand suggests that belief in Sod’s law is a combination of the law of truly large numbers and the psychological effect of the law of selection. The former says we should expect things to go wrong now and then, and the latter says we remember the exceptional events where something went wrong, but the great number of mundane events where nothing exceptional happened are forgotten.“
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect
„a phenomenon that occurs when an attempt to hide, remove, or censor information has the unintended consequence of increasing awareness of that information, often via the Internet.“
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law
„ninety percent of everything is crap“
„You have read some very despicable things […], but in all times, in all countries, and in all genres, the bad abounds, and the good is rare.“
„Four-fifths of everybody’s work must be bad. But the remnant is worth the trouble for its own sake.“
„Ninety percent of everything is crud.
Corollary 1: The existence of immense quantities of trash in science fiction is admitted and it is regrettable; but it is no more unnatural than the existence of trash anywhere.
Corollary 2: The best science fiction is as good as the best fiction in any field.“
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sutton%27s_law
„Go where the money is“
„Often cited in medical schools to teach new doctors to spend resources where they are most likely to pay off.“
„The law is named after bank robber Willie Sutton, who when asked why he robbed banks, is claimed to have answered “Because that’s where the money is.”“
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobler%27s_first_law_of_geography
„everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things“
„The theory is based upon the concept of the friction of distance “where distance itself hinders interaction between places. The farther two places are apart, the greater the hindrance”, or cost.“
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twyman%27s_law
„the more unusual or interesting the data, the more likely they are to have been the result of an error of one kind or another“
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Loon%27s_law
„The amount of mechanical development will always be in inverse ratio to the number of slaves that happen to be at a country’s disposal.“
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verdoorn%27s_law
„in the long run productivity generally grows proportionally to the square root of output“
„faster growth in output increases productivity due to increasing returns“
„Verdoorn’s law differs from “the usual hypothesis […] that the growth of productivity is mainly to be explained by the progress of knowledge in science and technology”“
„Verdoorn’s law is usually associated with cumulative causation models of growth, in which demand rather than supply determine the pace of accumulation.“
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vierordt%27s_law
„”short” intervals of time tend to be overestimated, and “long” intervals of time tend to be underestimated.“
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law
„software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware is becoming faster.“
„software manages to outgrow hardware in size and sluggishness.“
„two contributing factors to the acceptance of ever-growing software as: “rapidly growing hardware performance” and “customers’ ignorance of features that are essential versus nice-to-have”.“
„Enhanced user convenience and functionality supposedly justify the increased size of software, but Wirth argues that people are increasingly misinterpreting complexity as sophistication, that “these details are cute but not essential, and they have a hidden cost“.“
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yerkes%E2%80%93Dodson_law
„performance increases with physiological or mental arousal, but only up to a point. When levels of arousal become too high, performance decreases.“