Author: Lex Nunc

Bad money drives out good money.

Gresham’s law is an economics principle. If, for example there are two coins in circulation containing metal of different value and which are accepted by law as having similar face value, the more valuable coin based on the inherent value of its component metals will gradually disappear from circulation.

The law was named in 1857 by economist Henry Dunning Macleod after Sir Thomas Gresham (1519–1579), an English financier during the Tudor dynasty. Gresham had urged Queen Elizabeth to restore confidence in the then-debased English currency.

Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word “no.”

Betteridge’s law is based on the assumption that if the publishers of a headline were confident that the answer was yes, they would have presented it as an assertion; by presenting it as a question, they are not accountable for whether it is correct or not.

The law is named after Ian Betteridge, a British technology journalist who wrote about it in 2009. The maxim has been cited by other names since 1991, when a published compilation of Murphy’s law variants called it “Davis’s law”, a name that also appears online without any explanation of who Davis was. It has also been referred to as the “journalistic principle” and in 2007 was referred to in commentary as “an old truism among journalists”.

Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.

Brooks’ law is an observation about software project management coined by Fred Brooks in his 1975 book The Mythical Man-Month. According to Brooks, under certain conditions, an incremental person when added to a project makes it take more, not less time.

Ninety percent of everything is crap.

Sturgeon’s law (or Sturgeon’s revelation) is an adage coined by Theodore Sturgeon, an American science fiction author and critic. It was inspired by his observation that, while science fiction was often derided for its low quality by critics, most work in other fields was low-quality too, and so science fiction was no different.

In any dispute, the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake.

Sayre’s law is named after Wallace Stanley Sayre (1905–1972), a U.S. political scientist and professor at Columbia University. It relates to the personalised nature of academic politics, asserting that the intensity of academic squabbles was a function of the triviality”of the issue at hand. By way of corollary, it adds: “That is why academic politics are so bitter.”

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

Hofstadter’s law is a self-referential adage, coined by Douglas Hofstadter in his book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (1979) to describe the widely experienced difficulty of accurately estimating the time it will take to complete tasks of substantial complexity.

The law is often cited by programmers in discussions of techniques to improve productivity, such as The Mythical Man-Month or extreme programming.

The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude larger than to produce it.

Brandolini’s law (or the bullshit asymmetry principle) is an Internet adage coined in 2013 by Italian programmer Alberto Brandolini. It compares the considerable effort of debunking misinformation to the relative ease of creating it in the first place.

The challenge of refuting bullshit does not come just from its time-consuming nature, but also from the challenge of defying and confronting one’s community. Brandolini stated that he was inspired by reading Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow, right before watching an Italian political talk show involving former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and journalist Marco Travaglio.

Employees tend to rise to their level of incompetence.

The Peter principle is a concept in management developed by Laurence J. Peter which observes that people in a hierarchy tend to rise to “a level of respective incompetence”: employees are 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.

The concept was explained in the 1969 book The Peter Principle  by Laurence Peter and Raymond Hull. Hull wrote the text, which was based on Peter’s research. Peter and Hull intended the book to be satire, but it became popular as it was seen to make a serious point about the shortcomings of how people are promoted within hierarchical organizations. The Peter principle has since been the subject of much commentary and research.

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

Hanlon’s razor is a philosophical razor that suggests a way of eliminating unlikely explanations for human behaviour. It is purportedly named after Robert J. Hanlon, who submitted the statement to Murphy’s Law Book Two: More Reasons Why Things Go Wrong! (1980). Similar statements have been recorded since at least the 18th century.

The best way to get the right answer on the internet is to post the wrong answer.

Cunningham’s law is named after Ward Cunningham, the inventor of wiki software. According to the law’s author, Steven McGeady, Wikipedia may be the most well-known demonstration of this law.

Cunningham’s Law can be considered the Internet equivalent of the French saying “prêcher le faux pour savoir le vrai” (“preach the falsehood to know the truth”). Sherlock Holmes has been known to use the principle at times (for example, in The Sign of the Four). In “Duty Calls” (“Someone is wrong on the Internet”), xkcd references a similar concept. The Chinese idiom 拋磚引玉 “tossing a brick to attract jade” expresses a similar concept, though that idiom can refer to proposing something imperfect or of lower quality, but not necessarily false or wrong.