What are Laws?
A law is a summary of high-stability patterns — empirical generalizations from natural science, economics, management, information science, and long experience. Laws are stable across time and domain. They operate in the background whether you know about them or not.Laws are the physics engine of the world — running silently in the background, regardless of whether you believe in them.This category covers 35 core laws, organized into three groups:
- Economics & Management: understanding organizations, incentives, and markets
- Information & Technology: understanding the acceleration patterns of the digital age
- Thinking & Logic: understanding cognition and complex systems
Economics & Management
Pareto Principle (80/20 Rule)
80% of outcomes come from 20% of causes
Parkinson's Law
Work expands to fill all the time available for it
Peter Principle
People are promoted to their level of incompetence
Goodhart's Law
When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure
Campbell's Law
The more a quantitative metric is used for decision-making, the more it is corrupted
Gresham's Law
Bad money drives out good money
Law of Diminishing Returns
Beyond a certain point, each additional unit of input yields less output
Law of Supply and Demand
Price is jointly determined by supply and demand
Comparative Advantage
Specialize where your opportunity cost is lowest
Say's Law
Supply creates its own demand
Iron Law of Oligarchy
All organizations eventually become dominated by a small leadership elite
Price's Law
Half of all output is produced by a small fraction of contributors
Law of Unintended Consequences
Actions always have unforeseen effects beyond their intended outcomes
Information & Technology
Moore's Law
The number of transistors on a chip doubles approximately every two years
Metcalfe's Law
A network’s value scales with the square of the number of nodes
Brooks's Law
Adding people to a late software project makes it later
Conway's Law
System design mirrors the communication structure of the organization that builds it
Reed's Law
Network value grows exponentially with the number of possible subgroups
Zipf's Law
Word frequency is inversely proportional to its rank
Benford's Law
In natural datasets, “1” appears as the leading digit far more often than expected
Hofstadter's Law
Things always take longer than you expect, even accounting for Hofstadter’s Law
Amara's Law
We overestimate the short-term impact of technology; we underestimate the long-term
Bikeshedding (Parkinson's Law of Triviality)
People spend disproportionate time on trivial issues
Thinking & Logic
Murphy's Law
Anything that can go wrong will go wrong
Occam's Razor
The simplest explanation that fits the facts is usually correct
Hanlon's Razor
Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by incompetence
Dunbar's Law
Humans can maintain approximately 150 stable social relationships
Lindy Effect
The longer something has survived, the longer it is likely to survive
Power Law
A small number of items account for the vast majority of total output
Gall's Law
All effective complex systems evolved from simpler systems that worked
Sturgeon's Law
90% of everything is crud
Law of Large Numbers
As sample size grows, the sample mean converges to the population mean
Yerkes-Dodson Law
Performance improves with arousal up to an optimal point, then declines
Weber-Fechner Law
We perceive relative changes, not absolute ones
Newton's Third Law (Applied)
Every action has an equal and opposite reaction