Eponymous Laws

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Eponymous laws you need to know

• 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."
• Andy and Bill's law describes how, when a computer chip is released, new software will be released to use up all of its power.
• Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics formulated by Isaac Asimov:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.

• Atwood's law: Any software that can be written in JavaScript will eventually be written in JavaScript.
• Betteridge's law of headlines: "any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word 'no'".
• Brandolini's law: The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it
• Brooks's law: "Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later."
• Chekov's gun, states that nonessential elements of a story must be removed.
• Cheops law: "Nothing ever gets built on schedule or within budget."
• Claasen's law, or the logarithmic law of usefulness: usefulness = log(technology).
• Clarke's three laws, formulated by Arthur C. Clarke. Several corollaries to these laws have also been proposed.

1. 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.
2. Second law: The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
3. Third law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

• Conway's law: Any piece of software reflects the organizational structure that produced it.
• Cooper's law: The number of radio frequency conversations which can be concurrently conducted in a given area doubles every 30 months
• Cromwell's rule states that the use of prior probabilities of 0 ("the event will definitely not occur") or 1 ("the event will definitely occur") should be avoided, except when applied to statements that are logically true or false, such as 2+2 equaling 4 or 5.
• 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.
• De Morgan's laws apply to formal logic regarding the negation of pairs of logical operators.
• Dilbert principle: "the most ineffective workers are systematically moved to the place where they can do the least damage: management."
• Doctorow's law: "Anytime someone puts a lock on something you own, against your wishes, and doesn't give you the key, they're not doing it for your benefit."
• Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly rating their ability much higher than average. This bias is attributed to a metacognitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their mistakes.
• Engelbart's Law: "The intrinsic rate of human performance is exponential."
• Finagle's law, related to Murphy's Law, states "Anything that can go wrong, will – at the worst possible time."
• Fitts's law is a principle of human movement published in 1954 by Paul Fitts which predicts the time required to move from a starting position to a final target area. Fitts's law is used to model the act of pointing, both in the real world, e.g. with a hand or finger, and on a computer, e.g. with a mouse.
• Gall's law: "A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked."
• Gause's law, in ecology, the competitive exclusion principle: "complete competitors cannot coexist."
• Gérson's law: "An advantage should be taken in every situation, regardless of ethics."
• Gibrat's law: "The size of a firm and its growth rate are independent."
• Gibson's law: "For every PhD there is an equal and opposite PhD."
• 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."
• 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.
• Gustafson's law (also known as Gustafson–Barsis's law) in computer engineering: any sufficiently large problem can be efficiently parallelized.
• Hamilton's principle: the dynamics of a physical system is determined by a variational problem for a functional based on a single function, the Lagrangian, which contains all physical information concerning the system and the forces acting on it
• 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."
• 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.
• Hitchens's razor is an epistemological principle maintaining that the burden of evidence in a debate rests on the claim-maker, and that the opponent can dismiss the claim if this burden is not met: "That which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence."
• Hofstadter's law: "It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law"
• Hotelling's law in economics: Under some conditions, it is rational for competitors to make their products as nearly identical as possible
• Humphrey's law: conscious attention to a task normally performed automatically can impair its performance.
• Hutber's law: "Improvement means deterioration."
• Joy's law in management: the principle that "no matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else,”
• Kerckhoffs's principle of secure cryptography: A cryptosystem should be secure even if everything about the system, except the key, is public.
• Kirchhoff's laws are one law in thermodynamics and two about electrical circuits.
• Koomey's law: the energy of computation is halved every year and a half.
• 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.
• Linus's law: "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow."
• 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."
• Littlewood's law: individuals can expect miracles to happen to them, at the rate of about one per month.
• 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.
• Metcalfe's law, in communications and network theory: the value of a system grows as approximately the square of the number of users of the system.
• 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."
• 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."
• Moore's law is an empirical observation stating that the complexity of integrated circuits doubles every 24 months.
• Muphry's law: "If you write anything criticizing editing or proofreading, there will be a fault of some kind in what you have written."
• Murphy's law: "Anything that can go wrong will go wrong."
• 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."
• Newton's flaming laser sword, also known as Alder's razor: What cannot be settled by experiment is not worth debating.
• Niven's laws: "If the universe of discourse permits the possibility of time travel and of changing the past, then no time machine will be invented in that universe."
• Occam's razor: explanations should never multiply causes without necessity. ("Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.") When two or more explanations are offered for a phenomenon, the simplest full explanation is preferable.
• 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."
• Pareto principle: for many phenomena 80% of consequences stem from 20% of the causes.
• Parkinson's law: "Work expands to fill the time available for its completion." Corollary: "Expenditure rises to meet income."
• Parkinson's law of triviality: "The time spent on any agenda item will be in inverse proportion to the sum of money involved."
• Peter principle: "In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.
• Postel's law: Be conservative in what you do; be liberal in what you accept from others.
• 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.
• Rent's rule: In computing logic, the relationship between the number of external signal connections to a logic block (i.e., the number of "pins") with the number of logic gates in the logic block.
• 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.
• Rothbard's law: Everyone specializes in his own area of weakness.
• Schneier's law: "Any person can invent a security system so clever that she or he can't think of how to break it."
• Shermer's last law: "Any sufficiently advanced extraterrestrial intelligence is indistinguishable from God". This is a corollary to Clarke's third law.
• Shirky principle: "Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution."
• Sod's law states: "if something can go wrong, it will".
• Sowa's law of standards: "Whenever a major organization develops a new system as an official standard for X, the primary result is the widespread adoption of some simpler system as a de facto standard for X."
• 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.
• Stigler's law: No scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer. Named by statistician Stephen Stigler who attributes it to sociologist Robert K. Merton, making the law self-referential.
• Streisand effect: Any attempt to hide, remove, or censor a piece of information has the unintended consequence of publicizing the information more widely.
• Verdoorn's law, in economics: faster growth in output increases productivity due to increasing returns.
• Vierordt's law, states that, retrospectively, "short" intervals of time tend to be overestimated, and "long" intervals of time tend to be underestimated.
• Wiio's laws: The fundamental Wiio's law states that "Communication usually fails, except by accident".
• Wirth's law: Software gets slower more quickly than hardware gets faster.
• Yao's principle, in computational complexity theory: the expected cost of any randomized algorithm for solving a given problem, on the worst case input for that algorithm, can be no better than the expected cost, for a worst-case random probability distribution on the inputs, of the deterministic algorithm that performs best against that distribution.
• Zawinski's law: Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot expand are replaced by ones which can.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_eponymous_laws