Universal Laws of the World
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One idea that i've liked for a long time, and i've used IT in a lot of my work, is the idea that if an idea or a rule or a law is true, and one field IT is probably true, and others, you can learn a lot about your field, regardless of what your field is by study, lots of other fields. Because so many fields are just under the White umbrella of behavior.

How do people behave? How do people respond to risk and greed and fear? And so if you are an investor, or a doctor, or an engineer, or a kindergarten teacher, whatever IT might be, you can learn so much about your field by studying other fields, because all these other fields are connected by this common denominator of how do people behave.

And restricting your attention to only your own field, belding you to how many important things people in other fields have already figured out and learned and documented that might be very relevant to your own field. So what I want to do today, I will share with you a handful of laws. Most of these are laws that certain specific scientists coin often named after themselves through huge righty of fields, as you see.

But I think all of these laws from these various fields can help you in your field, in your profession, in your life, regardless of what you do are, let's jump right into this number one, maybe my favorite one i'll talk about today. It's called brand deline's law in its states. Quote, the amount of energy needed to refute bulls shit is an order of magnus de bigger than to produce IT.

This was coined by the italian software developer Albert Brantley, who also refers to IT as the bulls shit, a symmetry principal. No matter what field are in, you can relate to that. Now, this is common in every field.

And the non sotero version acknowledges for truths. The first is that people don't like to admit that they don't understand something. They don't admit that they're confused. So when they are confronted with nonsense, they are more likely to nod their head in agreement than they are to say, I don't understand IT can someone please help me? And that is especially true in a group setting.

The second is that in law, the reason the burden of proof lies with the prosecution is that IT is often impossible to prove something that didn't happen, but outside of the courtroom, the opposite rule prevails. And IT is the commenter on social media whether IT is who is allowed to give an opinion, but the critics is the one who must debunk them with evidence is the opposite of what happens in a rational setting like the court room. Third, uh, there is a thriving market for bad commentary because bad commentary, wrong commentary gives readers intellection al cover against their own biases and their prejudice and they're sentiments.

And so when many people want bad commentary or let's a bullshit to be right, they wanted to be right. IT becomes much harder to convince them that is wrong. And last, the barriers to entry, the publishing an opinion, have dropped so dramatically in the last two decades with social media that anybody who has an opinion about anything can say IT and get a platform.

And here now, in general, i'm a fan of that on net. I think we live in a much Better world now that there are not one or two media sources that everybody watches, that people have a voice in its open commentary. But like anything, of course, anybody who spends time on social media knows that you can overdose on that.

And this is where berlin is. Law comes into play, right? Number two, it's called little wood's law, which basically says that we can expect miracles to happen all the time, because in a world with seven billion people in IT, the odds of a one in a billion event are actually pretty good.

John little wood was a mathematician who was trying to deep bunk the idea of miracles being anything than just simple statistics. Now, many years ago, the physicist freeman dyson wrote about little wood's laws, and he wrote, quote, little woods, law of miracles states that in the course of any Normal person's life, miracles happen at the rate of roughly one per month. The proof of the law is simple.

During the time that we are awake and actively engaged in living in our lives, roughly for eight hours each day, we see and hear things happening at a rate of one per second. So the total number of events that happen to us is about thirty thousand per day or about a million per month. The chance of a miracle is about one per million events.

Therefore, we should expect about one miracle to happen on average every month. It's such basic, simple math, and it's so obvious that if you are watching the news or just living your ordinary life, very rare things happen all the time because we are exposed to so many things, particularly we are watching global news. It's gona highlight the one in a billion event that's happening somewhere in the world right now.

And that gives people this idea that the world is often more dangerous, more crazy, more scary than IT actually is because there are so many events taking place all over the world, and your attention is gonna drawn to the one in a billion event that, by simple statistics, happens every single day. Dan economy, great psychologist, has a related take to this. He says, quote, human beings cannot comprehend very large or very small numbers.

That would be useful for us to acknowledge that fact. But I moved not. Number three, this was called doll's law, which is in evolution. IT means an organism cannot reeves lw. To a former state, because the path that LED to its former state was so complicated that the odds of retracing that exact path round to zero, let me explain to me about that, say, an animal has a tale, and then IT evolves to lose that tae, the odds that will ever evolve to regain a tae, or basically zero. Because the path that originally gave IT, its tail, was so complex, IT cannot be recreated.

And I often think about this in culture and economics and business IT happens a lot of times to business where there are things that once you lose them will never be regained, because the chain of events that created them in the first place cannot be easily replicated. So think about brand. Brand is one of these things. Good brands are very hard to build.

IT requires the right product at the right time, targeted to the right users who want a specific thing, produce the right way by the right people, all done with consistency and trust that what you need to build a brand once you lose that brand, IT is very hard to regain because the odds of building a successful brand in the first place were so loaded to begin with. So once you'll lose IT, regaining IT is so difficult just because the odds have ever getting IT in the first place or so. Low teams and teamwork and culture can be another one of these things that really fits into doll's law, where success is often personalized.

Ed among one person, where you discount how important members of their team were to winning. So you have a big team that creates a product and one person gets off the recognition, right? And many star employees have joined another firm.

You know they were the superstars at one firm and they joined another company, uh, and they don't succeed and then they realize how much of their prior success was due to the unique team that they were on. And that team cannot be recreated. One takeaway from that is be very grateful for the skills and the opportunities that you have, because if you will lose them, IT is very hard to regain them.

I moving on number. What is this? Three, four? And know does not matter parkins flaw, which states that work expands to fill the time available for its completion. I am such A A victim of this product of this, where if you give me a deadline, I will wait until the very last second to do IT will will be very careful with the deadlines that you give me.

Uh, in one thousand nine hundred and fifty five, historian siro parkinson wrote in the economist, the magazine he wrote, quote, IT is a commonplace observation that work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. The total effort, which would occupy a busy man for three minutes, all told me in this fashion, leave another person. Prost, trade after a day of doubt, anxiety and toil.

This is like the common quote, if you want something done, give IT to a busy person. If you give IT to a person who has nothing on their calendar, they're going to wait in to the last second, procrastinate forever. This point, I think, was that resources can exceed needs without people even noticing IT.

So this happens in companies where the number of employees in an organization is not necessarily related to the amount of work that needs to get done in that organization is often just related to how much money they have. If the corporation has a lot of money, a lot of profits, they raise a lot of money, they're gona hire lot of people, not because there's a lot of work to be done, just because they have the money to do IT. And those workers will find something to do or the appearance of doing something regardless of what needs to be done.

People saw this a couple years ago when elan musk fired what was at two thirds of twitter people who like, well, at the end of the company, the product not going to work anymore. And actually I did, and I still does, even after fired seventy five percent of people. Several queries of this exist.

One is that expenses expand to fill in income. So a wealthy person is going to say, I need this, I have to have this so you need that. You don't know, you don't just because you have the money to do IT.

Uh the same as for expectations and success. So in I, T, data can expand to fill a given level of storage. So I would probably be completely fine if my iphone only held two hundred photos. I would be okay with that. And I would, I would delete all the bad ones.

So I only had two hundred good photos, but because I have some what storage I have, I don't know, ten thousand photos, nine thousand of which are bad photos that I won't care about in the future. So when i'm willing to hold, expands to how much I have. And that is true in so many fields, right? Next one, and I love this one, it's called sales law, which states that in any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the stakes of the issue.

So the the more trivial the issue, the more emotional you're gna get about IT in thousand nine hundred seventy three, the wall street journal, quote, quote, academics love to lay down laws one. The more famous is attributed to the late wallet sale of columbia university. SaaS third law of politics, no one seems doing over with.

The first two are states that academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics, because the stakes are so low. Now the logic of series law might go something like this, when the stakes are actually high. People within the culture have a pretty good track record of putting more of their differences aside for a common cause.

That was true during full war two. That was true in the early days of cover. At least you bigger when there is a little outside of doing so. But when things get real, people tend to come together and furry things out.

Member, the day after nine eleven, I think all of congress held hands on the steps of the capital and saying, god blush america, like when things are bad, people come together. But when the stakes are low, it's much easier to become emotional. And part of this is because I think there is a baseline of stress that people need in their lives to keep their minds alert.

And if they don't get IT from a legitimate threat, they need to find something else meaningless to read about and to argue about. And that's why the lower the stakes, the more emotional people tend to get about in issue. right? Next one, this one's called stigler law.

IT states that no scientific discovery is named after its original discovery. University of chicago statisticians Stephen stigler coin the slog and for consistency. He says that he actually saw IT from Robert merton, singular, writes in his book about statistics.

He writes, quote, examples of firing this principal must be known to every scientist with even a passing interest in history of a subject. In fact, I suspect that most historians of science, both amateur professional, have had their interest fuelled early in their studies by the discovery that some famous named result was known by a worker generations before the results namesake. I think this happens for a couple of reasons.

One is that few discoveries happen in isolation. Most big discoveries, most big inventions, are combinations of existing discoveries that solve a new problem with an old invention. Stephen Johnson, great author.

He writes in his book how we got to know that, quote, innovations usually begin life with an attempt to solve a specific problem, but once they get into circulation, they end up trigger ing other changes that would have been extremely difficult to predict in innovation. Or cluster of innovations in one field ends up trigger ing changes that seem to belong to a different domain altogether. So taking other people's work in combining into something that you get credit for, that happens in all kinds of fields and companies.

Bill gates once said that, quote Steve jobs, and i'll always get more credit than we deserve because otherwise the story is too complicated. Like it's a great story that to say Steve jobs made the iphone and it's directly true, but no thousands of people worked on the iphone, right? The other thing, and I think this is more applicable, distinguish law, is the long history of the crowned winner is the person who just communicated the idea.

The best IT told the best story, not necessarily whose idea was best or who had the right idea. So a pop psychology book will always sell Better than deep academic research written by the person who actually discovered these insights, because it's easier to read and it's more enjoyable. So when the best story wins, not necessarily the right idea, it's always going to be the case that people who did not discover something or invent something end up getting the credit for IT.

Exceptions are called mill mistakes, which is assuming the familiar is the optimal. James mill was a one thousand nine century Scottish economist who reason that a constitutional monarchy was the highest natural form of government that existed. Now he had his logic, and arguing whether he was right or wrong is not the point, but in his book, at home, in the universe, start coff and makes a really good observation about James mill.

He said, quote, James mill wants to duced from what he considered dispute, able first principles that a constitutional monarchy, remarkably like what they had in england in his day, was obviously the highest form of government. One is always in danger of reducing the optimal from the familiar. Let's call this a little mistake.

God knows we all suffer the danger. Of course we do, right? What you're familiar, we'll create the most in and story in your head that, look, this government works.

And if here's how IT works, because that's what I see you see right in front of you. Everything else is theoretical. So you get an extra credit.

You get an extra credit points over other ideas that might actually be Better and hold more water, but they are harder to contextualize danial conomo once wrote, neither the quantity nor the quality of the evidence counts for much in subjective confidence. The confidence that individuals have in their beliefs depends mostly on the quality of the story they can tell about what they see. Even if they see very little, we often fail to allow for the possibility that evidence that should be critical to our judgment is missing.

Can send this up by saying this great quote. He says, quote, what we see is all there is. This is what we assume.

What we see, what we've experience makes the most sense. So we assume it's the best. All right, last one, this once called he comes law IT says that problems in complex systems rarely have one cause.

Oakers reader in medicine guides doctors to a diagnostic rule of them that specially along the lines of if there are several explanations for a patient symptoms, choose the one that makes the fewest assumptions. This is known as diagnostic parSimony. John hick han, who came up with the slaw, once, pointed out the limitations of this rule.

He said, quote, patients can have as many diseases as they damn well please. So look, his observation was that a patient is statistically more likely to have a few common elements, one single, rare one. So the push to get to one big idea, one cause of their elements and their underline cause, can lead to false precision at best, if not missed diagnosis altogether.

He point out that the human body has eleven systems. IT has seventy nine organs. IT has two hundred and six bone and six hundred different muscles. And you can extend this to the globe economy, which has more than seven billion people and around two hundred million businesses.

So you do the math, what are the odds that one single element in your body, or in the economy or in your life, is actually the cause of your problems? It's very low. That's IT for this week. Enjoy your thanksgiving and we'll see you again next time.