Collection of interesting concepts and laws

This post is a living collection of laws and concepts that I find interesting. 

• Occam's razor states that the simplest solution is most likely the right one

• Miller's law states that to understand what another person is saying, you must assume that it is true and try to imagine what it could be true of.

• Metcalfe's law states the effect of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the system (n2)

• Pareto principle states that roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes

• Peter principle is a concept in management developed by Laurence J. Peter, which observes that people in a hierarchy tend to rise to their "level of incompetence". In other words, an employee is promoted based on their success in previous jobs until they reach a level at which they are no longer competent, as skills in one job do not necessarily translate to another.

• Conway's law states that organizations which design systems ... are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.

• Moral panic is a feeling of fear spread among many people that some evil threatens the well-being of society

• Hanlon's razor states Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

• Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which people mistakenly assess their cognitive ability as greater than it is. It is related to the cognitive bias of illusory superiority and comes from the inability of people to recognize their lack of ability.

• Dunbar's number is a suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships—relationships in which an individual knows who each person is and how each person relates to every other person

• Parkinson's law is the adage that "work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion".

• Risk compensation is a theory which suggests that people typically adjust their behavior in response to the perceived level of risk, becoming more careful where they sense greater risk and less careful if they feel more protected.

• Moore's law is the observation that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubles about every two years.

• Founder's syndrome is the difficulty faced by organizations where one or more founders maintain disproportionate power and influence following the effective initial establishment of the project, leading to a wide range of problems for the organization

• Hofstadter's Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.

• Bikeshed effect is “the amount of discussion is inversely proportional to the complexity of the topic that has been around for a long time.”

• Student syndrome refers to planned procrastination, when, for example, a student will only start to apply themselves to an assignment at the last possible moment before its deadline

• Lindy effect is a theory that the future life expectancy of some non-perishable things like a technology or an idea is proportional to their current age so that every additional period of survival implies a longer remaining life expectancy


• Campbell's law is "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."

• Cobra effect occurs when an attempted solution to a problem makes the problem worse

• Jevons paradox occurs when technological progress or government policy increases the efficiency with which a resource is used (reducing the amount necessary for any one use), but the rate of consumption of that resource rises due to increasing demand.

• Dilbert principle states that companies tend to systematically promote incompetent employees to management to get them out of the workflow.

• Ship of Theseus is a thought experiment that raises the question of whether an object that has had all of its components replaced remains fundamentally the same object.

• Tyranny of small decisions is a phenomenon explored in an essay of the same name, published in 1966 by the American economist Alfred E. Kahn.[1] The article describes a situation in which a number of decisions, individually small and insignificant in size and time perspective, cumulatively result in a larger and significant outcome which is neither optimal nor desired