> ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://meta.niceshare.site/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Laws ยท Stable Principles That Govern How the World Works > 35 laws and principles from economics, technology, management, and logic โ€” stable patterns that operate whether you're aware of them or not. Understanding them lets you work with the grain of reality. ## What are Laws? A law is a **summary of high-stability patterns** โ€” 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 โ€” 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 80% of outcomes come from 20% of causes Work expands to fill all the time available for it People are promoted to their level of incompetence When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure The more a quantitative metric is used for decision-making, the more it is corrupted Bad money drives out good money Beyond a certain point, each additional unit of input yields less output Price is jointly determined by supply and demand Specialize where your opportunity cost is lowest Supply creates its own demand All organizations eventually become dominated by a small leadership elite Half of all output is produced by a small fraction of contributors Actions always have unforeseen effects beyond their intended outcomes *** ## Information & Technology The number of transistors on a chip doubles approximately every two years A network's value scales with the square of the number of nodes Adding people to a late software project makes it later System design mirrors the communication structure of the organization that builds it Network value grows exponentially with the number of possible subgroups Word frequency is inversely proportional to its rank In natural datasets, "1" appears as the leading digit far more often than expected Things always take longer than you expect, even accounting for Hofstadter's Law We overestimate the short-term impact of technology; we underestimate the long-term People spend disproportionate time on trivial issues *** ## Thinking & Logic Anything that can go wrong will go wrong The simplest explanation that fits the facts is usually correct Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by incompetence Humans can maintain approximately 150 stable social relationships The longer something has survived, the longer it is likely to survive A small number of items account for the vast majority of total output All effective complex systems evolved from simpler systems that worked 90% of everything is crud As sample size grows, the sample mean converges to the population mean Performance improves with arousal up to an optimal point, then declines We perceive relative changes, not absolute ones Every action has an equal and opposite reaction