NEW NATURAL LAWS

 AN UPDATE ON LOADED PRINCIPLES

1. Solomon's Paradox: We're better at solving other people's problems than our own because detachment yields objectivity. But Kross et al (2014) found viewing oneself in the 3rd person yields the same detachment, so when trying to help yourself, imagine you're helping a friend.

2. 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, because people are more interested in criticizing you than helping you.

3. Bonhoeffer's Theory of Stupidity: Evil can be guarded against. Stupidity cannot. And the world's few evil people have little power without the help of the world's many stupid people. Therefore, stupidity is a far greater threat than evil.

4. Brooks's law: "Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.

5. Gibson's Law: “For every PhD, there is an equal and opposite PhD.”

In courtroom trials & political debates, anyone can find a subject-matter expert who supports their view, because having a PhD doesn’t make someone right, it often just makes them more skilled at being wrong.

6. Surrogate Activities: The more we eliminate struggles from our lives, the more we create artificial struggles – sports, video games, Twitter culture wars – because the mind wants peace, but also needs conflict.

7. Shirky Principle: To ensure survival, institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution. E.g. Arms manufacturers lobby politicians to push for new wars, and light bulb manufacturers deliberately make their bulbs short-lived so you buy them more often.

8. Babble Hypothesis: According to multiple studies, what best predicts whether someone becomes a leader? Their experience? Their IQ?

        No. The amount of time they spend talking. It doesn't even matter what they say, just how
        much they say it. We suck at picking leaders.

9. Noble Cause Corruption: The greatest evils come not from those seeking to do bad, but from those seeking to do good and believing the ends justify the means. Ironically, few things justify the immoral treatment of others more than the belief that you're more moral than them.

10. Noise Bottlenecks: Consuming online content makes us feel like we're learning, but 90% of the content is useless junk—small talk, clickbait, marketing—which crowds out actual info from our minds. As such, we feel we're getting smarter as we get stupider.

11. Walson's law: If you keep putting information and intelligence first at all the time, money keeps coming in.

12. Clarke’s Second Law: The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

13. Clarke’s Third Law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

14. Godwin’s Law: As a discussion on the Internet grows longer, the likelihood of a person/s being compared to Hitler or another Nazi increases.

15. The Streisand Effect: When an attempt is made to remove a piece of information (because it is not meant for that audience), it gets much more publicity than intended, and becomes known more widely.

16. Kidlin's Law: If you have a problem, write it down clearly and that's half done.

17. Falkland’s Law: When there is no need to make a decision, don't make a decision.

18. Gilbert's Law: The biggest problem at work is that none tells you what to do.

19. Amara's Law: We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.

20. Andy and Bill's Law: When a computer chip is released, new software will be released to use up all of its power.

21. Benford's Law of Controversy: Passion is inversely proportional to the amount of real information available.

22. Betteridge's Law of Headlines: Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word ‘no'.

23. Dilbert principle: "the most ineffective workers are systematically moved to the place where they can do the least damage: management.

Gall's Law: A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked.

23. Brandolini's Law: The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.

24. 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.