Laws and Laughs
Rules are a great way to get ideas. All you have to do is break them—Jack Foster
Roy Amara was a researcher and president of the Institute for the Future. Among things he is known for is coining Amara’s law on the effect of technology.
Today Ken and I want to discuss “laws”. We hope you will like the smile that many of these give us. Perhaps they will give you some too.
Amara’s Law and More
Amara’s law is:
We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.
Tom Cargill’s law is:
The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time.
Arthur Clarke’s law is:
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.
Fred Brooks’s law is:
Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.
Brooks explains it: First, it takes the new guy some time to learn about the project before becoming productive. Teaching him takes resources that could otherwise be put into the project itself. Second, communication overheads increase as the number of people increases – sometimes, they spend more time talking to each other to keep the project in sync, rather than working on the project itself.
Here is a list of many additional interesting laws from PC Magazine. Some of our favorites are:
- The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question; it’s to post the wrong answer.
- If you can think of four ways that something can go wrong, it will go wrong in the fifth way.
- Everything takes longer than you think it will.
- Nature always sides with the hidden flaw.
- The light at the end of the tunnel is only the light of an oncoming train.
Open Problems
The third of the last five laws from PC Magazine was given a fuller statement by Douglas Hofstadter:
Hofstadter’s Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.
Ken notes a similarity to his “law of prediction” at the end of the “Paradox” section of his post about Mark Glickman: All simple and elegant prediction models are overconfident.
What are some of your own favorite laws?
In the second chapter of his Theory of heat, thermometry or the theory of temperature (1871), Maxwell defined temperature related to a bodies power to communicate heat to other bodies. The Law of Equal Temperatures (LET) might appear to be a special case of the Euclidean claim that things equal to the same thing are equal to each other. Maxwell, however, was quite explicit that the law is not a truism or a theory of identity. The truth, he said, is “the foundation of the whole science of thermometry)” Maxwell 1871. Not a logical truth but a law.
“Nothing’s ever for sure, John. That’s the only sure thing I know.” – Paul Bettany in A Beautiful Mind (2001).
Zeroth Law Of Semiotics
Meaning is a privilege not a right.
Not all pictures depict.
Not all signs denote.
Never confuse a property of a sign,
just for instance, existence,
with a sign of a property,
for instance, existence.
Taking a property of a sign
for a sign of a property
is the zeroth sign of
nominal thinking
and the first
mistake.
Also Sprach 0*
9 October 2002
There’s a version of Parkinson’s Law for committees: Most of the time is spent on the most trivial issue. And then there’s the corollary: The most important issues are decided in the last minute without discussion.
The Peter Principle is often stated states as
People rise to their level of incompetence
The idea is that if Bob is good at a job he will get promoted. If he is good at the new job then he will get promoted. This keeps happening until he is at a job he is bad at, then he stays there. Oh well.
Bill, Peter principle is a good example. Luckily some of us never got promoted.
It might be noted that Laurence J. Peter was an educator, with a degree in education, so he may have been mostly writing about academia! Similar sayings are that, `those who can’t do teach, those who can’t teach teach education, and those who can’t teach education become administrators.’ ha ha
“If you don’t know where you are going, you’ll end up someplace else.”
― Yogi Berra
“Statistics are a lot like a bikini – they show you a lot, but they don’t show you everything.”
― Lou Piniella
The Present Is Big With The Future
“It is one of the rules of my system of general harmony, that the present is big with the future, and that he who sees all sees in that which is that which shall be.” — Leibniz
The Clarke rule on the double:
When a young but junior scientist states that something is impossible, at worst he will be proven wrong and at best he will keep saying it while turning into a distinguished but elderly scientist.
The light you see at the end of the tunnel is the sky above the hole you are digging yourself into.
A few years ago you cited Alan Perlis with: There are two ways to write correct programs –
but only the third one works.
“The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits” -Albert Einstein
Wadge’s Law (of citations)
“No matter how unusual your last name, no matter how impressive your publication list, when you look up your citations there’s someone with the same name who totally outperforms you”.
For more, see Bill Wadge’s “Laws of the Universe and Teaching”:
https://billwadge.com/2019/03/24/laws-of-the-universe-and-teaching/
True story: My niece is an aspiring photographer and filmmaker. I suggested she study the work of Ken Regan.