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Laws

There is a great deal of debate as to what actually constitutes a law of natures, specifically if there are any strict laws or if they only apply ceteris paribus, which is to say that there are many reasons why they may not hold in practice such as the interference of external systems. In my own personal definition, a law describes a relationship that holds between two quantities, while a rule describes optimal behavior under a given condition with some amount of generality.

  • Law of Jante: code of conduct known in Nordic countries that characterizes not conforming, doing things out of the ordinary, or being overtly personally ambitious as unworthy and inappropriate
  • Hobson's Choice, a choice of taking what is available or nothing at all (i.e. take it or leave it).
  • Kranzberg's laws of technology: The first law states that technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.
  • Landauer's principle: there is a minimum possible amount of energy required to change one bit of information, known as the Landauer limit.
  • Rothbard's law: Everyone specializes in his own area of weakness.
    • https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/jul/27/change-your-life-rothbards-law
  • Smeed's law is an empirical rule relating traffic fatalities to traffic congestion as measured by the proxy of motor vehicle registrations and country population. After R. J. Smeed.[^10](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_eponymous_laws#cite_note-10)
  • Rules of Thumb
    • Naismith's rule is a rule of thumb that helps in the planning of a walking or hiking expedition by calculating how long it will take to walk the route, including ascents.
  • In culture
    • Sturgeon's law: "Ninety percent of everything is crud." Derived from a quote by science fiction author Theodore Sturgeon (1918–1985).
    • Shirky principle: "Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution."
    • Chekov's gun, states that nonessential elements of a story must be removed.
    • Gérson's law: "An advantage should be taken in every situation, regardless of ethics."
    • Isaac Bonewits's laws of magic are synthesized from a multitude of belief systems from around the world, collected in order to explain and categorize magical beliefs within a cohesive framework.
    • Neuhaus's law: Where orthodoxy is optional, orthodoxy will sooner or later be proscribed. This "law" had been expressed earlier. For example, Charles Porterfield Krauth wrote in his The Conservative Reformation: "Truth started with tolerating; it comes to be merely tolerated, and that only for a time. Error claims a preference for its judgments on all disputed points."
  • In Economics
    • Van Loon's 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." Named for Hendrik Willem van Loon.
    • Wagner's law predicts that the development of an industrial economy will be accompanied by an increased share of public expenditure in gross national product, and is named after the German economist Adolph Wagner (1835–1917).
    • Walras's law: budget constraints imply that the values of excess market demands must sum to zero.
    • Say's law, attributed to economist Jean-Baptiste Say by economist John Maynard Keynes: "supply creates its own demand", i.e., if businesses produce more output in a free market economy, the wages and other payment for productive inputs will provide sufficient demand so that there is no general glut.[^8](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_eponymous_laws#cite_note-8)
    • Ostrom's law, in economics and property law: resource arrangements in practice can be represented in theory, such as arrangements of the commons or shared property.
    • Hotelling's law in economics: Under some conditions, it is rational for competitors to make their products as nearly identical as possible.
    • Elliott wave principle is a form of technical analysis that finance traders use to analyze financial market cycles and forecast market trends by identifying extremes in investor psychology, highs and lows in prices, and other collective factors. Named for American accountant Ralph Nelson Elliott.
    • Gibrat's law: "The size of a firm and its growth rate are independent."
    • Gossen's laws are three laws in economics relating to utility and value, formulated by Hermann Heinrich Gossen.
    • Sutton's 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."
  • In interaction, discourse
    • Benford's law of controversy: Passion is inversely proportional to the amount of real information available.
    • Brandolini's law: The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it. Named after Italian programmer Alberto Brandolini. Bullshit Asymmetry Law.
    • Cunningham's law: The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question, it’s to post the wrong answer. Attributed to Ward Cunningham by Steven McGeady.
    • Godwin's law, an adage in Internet culture: "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one." Coined by Mike Godwin in 1990.
    • Lewis's law: The comments on any article about feminism justify feminism. Named for English journalist Helen Lewis.
    • Miller's law, in communication: "To understand what another person is saying, you must assume that it is true and try to imagine what it could be true of." Named after George Armitage Miller.
    • Streisand effect: Any attempt to hide, remove, or censor a piece of information has the unintended consequence of publicizing the information more widely.
    • Sayre's law: "In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the stakes at issue." By way of corollary, the law adds: "That is why academic politics are so bitter."
  • In Psychology
    • Hanlon's razor is a corollary of Finagle's law, named in allusion to Occam's razor, normally taking the form "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." As with Finagle, possibly not strictly eponymous. Alternatively, "Do not invoke conspiracy as explanation when ignorance and incompetence will suffice, as conspiracy implies intelligence."
    • Dunbar's 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. First proposed by British anthropologist Robin Dunbar.
    • Hebb's law: "Neurons that fire together wire together."
    • Hick's law, in psychology, describes the time it takes for a person to make a decision as a function of the number of possible choices.
    • Humphrey's law: conscious attention to a task normally performed automatically can impair its performance. Described by psychologist George Humphrey in 1923.
    • Stevens's power law, in psychophysics, relates the intensity of a stimulus to its perceived strength. It supersedes the Weber-Fechner law, since it can describe a wider range of sensations. The theory is named after its inventor, S. Smith Stevens (1906–1973).
    • Weber–Fechner law, named after the Germans Ernst Heinrich Weber and Gustav Theodor Fechner, attempts to describe the human perception of various physical stimuli. In most cases, Stevens's power lawgives a more accurate description.
    • Yerkes–Dodson law, an empirical relationship between arousal and performance, originally developed by psychologists Robert M. Yerkes and John Dillingham Dodson.
    • Grassmann's law (optics), an empirical result about human color perception: that chromatic sensation can be described in terms of an effective stimulus consisting of linear combinations of different light colors.
    • Parkinson's law: "Work expands to fill the time available for its completion." Corollary: "Expenditure rises to meet income." Coined by C. Northcote Parkinson (1909–1993).
      • The Asimov corollary to Parkinson's law: In ten hours a day you have time to fall twice as far behind your commitments as in five hours a day.
    • Parkinson's law of triviality: "The time spent on any agenda item will be in inverse proportion to the sum of money involved." Also due to C. Northcote Parkinson.
    • Papert's 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."
  • In Software Development
    • Conway's law: Any piece of software reflects the organizational structure that produced it. Named after Melvin Conway.
    • Greenspun's tenth rule: Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp; coined by Philip Greenspun.
    • Linus's law: "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow." Named for Linus Torvalds.
    • Zawinski's law: Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot expand are replaced by ones which can.
    • Mooers's law: "An information retrieval system will tend not to be used whenever it is more painful and troublesome for a customer to have information than for him not to have it." An empirical observation made by American computer scientist Calvin Mooers in 1959.
  • In R&D, Economies of Scale
    • Grosch's law: the economic value of computation increases with the square root of the increase in speed; that is, to do a calculation 10 times as cheaply you must do it 100 times as fast. Stated by Herb Grosch in 1965.
    • Haitz's law is an observation and forecast about the steady improvement, over many years, of light-emitting diodes (LEDs).
    • Swanson's law: solar cell prices fall 20% for every doubling of solar cell industry manufacturing capacity. The law is named after SunPower Corporation founder Dr. Richard Swanson.
    • Verdoorn's law, in economics: faster growth in output increases productivity due to increasing returns. Named after Dutch economist Petrus Johannes Verdoorn.
    • Stein's law: If something cannot go on forever, it will stop. If a trend cannot go on forever, there is no need for action or a program to make it stop, much less to make it stop immediately; it will stop of its own accord.
  • In Management, negative selection
    • Brooks's law: "Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later." Named after Fred Brooks, author of the well known book on project management The Mythical Man-Month.
    • Cheops law: "Nothing ever gets built on schedule or within budget."
    • Dilbert principle: "the most ineffective workers are systematically moved to the place where they can do the least damage: management." Coined by Scott Adams as a variation of the Peter principle of employee advancement; named after Adams's Dilbert comic strip.
    • Peter principle: "In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence." Coined by Dr. Laurence J. Peter (1919–1990) in his book The Peter Principle. In his follow-up book, The Peter Prescription, he offered possible solutions to the problems his principle could cause.
    • Putt's law: 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.
    • Putt's corollary: Every technical hierarchy, in time, develops a competence inversion.
    • Rosenthal effect, also known as the Pygmalion effect: Higher expectations lead to an increase in performance, or low expectations lead to a decrease in performance. Named after Robert Rosenthal (1933 – ).
  • In System Design
    • Duverger's law: Winner-take-all (or first-past-the-post) electoral systems tend to create a 2 party system, while proportional representation tends to create a multiple party system. Named for Maurice Duverger.
    • Gall's law: "A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked."
    • Postel's law: Be conservative in what you do; be liberal in what you accept from others. Derived from RFC 761 (Transmission Control Protocol, 1980) in which Jon Postel summarized earlier communications of desired interoperability criteria for the Internet Protocol (cf. IEN 111)[^7](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_eponymous_laws#cite_note-7)
  • In Networks
  • Related to Pareto, diminishing returns
    • Bradford's law is a pattern described by Samuel C. Bradford in 1934 that estimates the exponentially diminishing returns of extending a library search.
    • Claasen's law, or the logarithmic law of usefulness: usefulness = log(technology).
    • Eroom's law, the observation that drug discovery is becoming slower and more expensive over time, despite improvements in technology. The name "Eroom" is "Moore" spelled backward, in order to contrast it with Moore's law.
    • Lotka's law, in infometrics: the number of authors publishing a certain number of articles is a fixed ratio to the number of authors publishing a single article. As the number of articles published increases, authors producing that many publications become less frequent. For example, there may be 1/4 as many authors publishing two articles within a specified time period as there are single-publication authors, 1/9 as many publishing three articles, 1/16 as many publishing four articles, etc. Though the law itself covers many disciplines, the actual ratios involved are very discipline-specific.
    • Zipf's law, in linguistics, is the observation that the frequency of use of the n__th-most-frequently-used word in any natural language is approximately inversely proportional to __n, or, more simply, that a few words are used very often, but many or most are used rarely. Named after George Kingsley Zipf (1902–1950), whose statistical body of research led to the observation. More generally, the term Zipf's law refers to the probability distributions involved, which is applied by statisticians not only to linguistics but also to fields remote from that. See also Zipf–Mandelbrot law.
  • In Estimation, measurement
    • Amara's law states that, "We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run." Named after Roy Amara (1925–2007).
    • Campbell's 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."[^1](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_eponymous_laws#cite_note-Campbell-1976-1) Named after Donald T. Campbell (1916–1996)
    • Clarke's three laws, formulated by Arthur C. Clarke. Several corollaries to these laws have also been proposed.
      • First law: When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
      • Second law: The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
      • Third law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
    • Goodhart's law: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
    • Hofstadter's law: "It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's law" (Douglas Hofstadter, Gödel, Escher, Bach, 1979).
    • Maes–Garreau law: most favorable predictions about future technology will fall around latest possible date they can come true and still remain in the lifetime of the person making the prediction.
    • Vierordt's law, states that, retrospectively, "short" intervals of time tend to be overestimated, and "long" intervals of time tend to be underestimated. Named after German physician Karl von Vierordt.
    • Benford's law: In any collection of statistics, a given statistic has roughly a 30% chance of starting with the digit 1.
    • Little's law, in queuing theory: "The average number of customers in a stable system (over some time interval) is equal to their average arrival rate, multiplied by their average time in the system." The law was named for John Little from results of experiments in 1961.
    • Gompertz–Makeham law of mortality: the death rate is the sum of an age-independent component and an age-dependent component.
    • Lindy Effect: A theorized phenomenon by which the future life expectancy of some non-perishable things, like a technology or an idea, is proportional to their current age.
    • Littlewood's law: individuals can expect miracles to happen to them, at the rate of about one per month. Coined by Professor J E Littlewood, (1885–1977).
    • Segal's law: "A man with a watch knows what time it is. A man with two watches is never sure."
  • In Biology
    • Briffault's 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." Named after Robert Briffault.
    • Dolbear's law is an empirical relationship between temperature and the rate of cricket chirping.
    • Dollo's law: "An organism is unable to return, even partially, to a previous stage already realized in the ranks of its ancestors." Simply put this law states that evolution is not reversible; the "law" is regarded as a generalisation as exceptions may exist.[^2](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_eponymous_laws#cite_note-2)[^3](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_eponymous_laws#cite_note-3)[^4](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_eponymous_laws#cite_note-4)
    • Liebig's law of the minimum: The growth or distribution of a plant is dependent on the one environmental factor most critically in demand.
    • Lanchester's laws are formulae for calculating the relative strengths of predator/prey pair and application in military conflict.