Scott Atran

Atran's Power Law of History

(a corollary to the law of unintended consequences)

The major events that determine human history follow a power distribution (a more or less straight line on a log-log scale), with catastrophic and cascading consequences (economic and health crises, political and cultural revolutions, war and terrorism, etc.), because people naturally prefer to act upon the future based on their modeling of past occurrences. People do not repeat the catastrophes of history because they forget it; people build up self-destructing ideologies and behavior patterns that continue history's catastrophic path because they remember the past too well (e.g., "the maginot effect" for war and the soon-to-be "box-cutting effect" for terrorism).

Ancillary: For politics, history's most well-developed and self-assured "isms" (e.g., colonialism, fascism, communism, globalism) are those most prone to radical collapse.

Atran's Law of Bare Counterintuition

(for the cultural survival of absurd ideas)

Natural selection endowed humans with an intuitive ontology that includes folkbiology (e.g., biodiversity divides into mutually exclusive groups of beings, and each group has a proprietary essence), folkpsychology (e.g., intentional and emotional beings have bodies, and have knowledge of other like beings by observing and inferring how other bodies act), and folkphysics (e.g., two bodies cannot simultaneously occupy the same place at the same time, and no body can occupy different places at the same time). Barely counterintuitive ideas, which violate universal constraints on intuitive ontology (e.g., a bodiless being) but otherwise retain most commonsense properties associated with intuitive ontology (a bodiless being who mostly acts and thinks like a person), are those fictions most apt to survive within a culture, most likely to recur in different cultures, and most disposed to cultural variation and elaboration (e.g., sphinxes and griffins, spirits and crystal balls, ghosts and gods).

Ancillary: For religion (i.e., for most humans in all human societies), the more costly one's commitment to some factually absurd but barely counterintuitive world (e.g., afterlife), the more others believe that person to be sincere and trustworthy.

Esther Dyson

Dyson's Law

Do ask; don't lie.

(Rationale:) How can we find the happy medium between disclosure and prying, between transparency and overexposure? The last thing we want is a law saying that everyone should disclose everything: vested interests, negotiating strategies, intentions, bank account, marital status, whatever.

How can we instead devise some rule that fits the best qualities of the Net decentralized, more or less self-enforcing, flexible.....and responsive to personal choices? The idea is to create a culture that expects disclosure, rather than a legal regime that requires it. People can decide how much they want to play, and others can decide whether to play with them.

First of all, it's two-way. It's not for a single person; it's for an interaction. The first person has to ask; the second person, to answer truthfully or refuse openly to answer.

It drives the responsibility for requiring disclosure down to where it belongs - to those most likely to be affected by the disclosure. It decentralizes the requirement and the enforcement to everyone, instead of leaving it in the hands of a few at the top. (If that's an awkward use of "requirement," it's because we don't even have a word for "decentralized command.")

As an individual, you are not commanded to answer; you may want to protect your own privacy or someone else's. But if you do answer, you must do so truthfully.

Then it's up to the people involved to decide whether to engage - in conversation, in a transaction, in whatever kind of interaction they might be contemplating. The magic of Do ask; don't lie is that the parties to any particular interaction can make a specific, local decision about what level of disclosure is appropriate.

David Bunnell

Bunnell's First Law of Retrievability

Everything is retrievable.

Bunnell's Second Law of Retrievability

Everything is stored somewhere. The secret to retrieving things is simply finding out where they are stored.

Charles Arthur

Arthur's First Law

Nothing is evenly spread; everything happens in clumps. The universe has clumps—galaxies, star systems, stars, planets, asteroids. You meet an old friend for the first time in years, then again and again. The smart folk are all together. It's a universal.

Arthur's Second Law

More data is good, and drives out the bad.

Philip W. Anderson

Anderson's Law

More is different.

Pamela McCorduck

McCorduck's Law

A linear projection into the future of any science or technology is like a form of propaganda — often persuasive, almost always wrong.

John Skoyles

Skoyles' Law of Culture and the Brain

Human culture and human cognition exists because the brain's neural plasticity allows learned symbolic associations to substitute for the innate inputs and outputs of already evolved ape cognitions, a process that extends greatly their functionality.

Skoyles' Law of Literacy

A society develops democracy to the degree that it writes social, legal and religious ideas using the syntax, vocabulary and pronunciation of everyday speech, rather than that of a professional, literary or dead language.

Todd Siler

Siler's First Law

The brain is what the brain creates. Its workings reflect the workings of everything it creates.

Siler's Second Law

Genius is everywhere, everyday, in everyone, in every way imaginable.

Garniss Curtis

Curtis' First Law

With several unknown keys in hand, one of which fits the lock in front of you, the first time you try all the keys, none will open it.

Curtis' Second Law

If you try all the keys again, there is only a fifty/fifty chance you will be successful.

Marvin Minsky

Minsky's First Law

Words should be your servants, not your masters.

Minsky's Second Law

Don't just do something. Stand there.

Kevin Kelly

Kellys' First Law

Power, understanding, control. Pick any two.

Kellys' Second Law

Nobody is as smart as everybody.

John McWhorter

McWhorter's Law of Social History

In a context of widespread literacy, easy communications, and a large class of people with ample leisure time, the social movement that begins by addressing a concrete grievance will, after the grievance has been largely addressed, pass into the hands of persons inclined for individual reasons towards the dramatic and self-righteous, who will manipulate the movement's iconography and passion into a staged indignation difficult for outsiders to square with reality, and with little actively progressive or beneficent intention.

John Allen Paulos

Paulos' Law of Coincidence

People often note some unlikely conjunction of events and marvel at the coincidence. Could anything be more wonderfully improbable, they wonder. The answer is Yes. The most amazing coincidence of all would be the complete absence of coincidence.

Freeman Dyson

Dyson's Law of Obsolescence

If you are writing history and try to keep it up-to-date up to a time T before the present, it will be out-of-date within a time T after the present.

This law applies also to scientific review articles.

( Thanks for including the Doctor Moreau quote, which describes us very well.)

Richard Nisbett

Nisbett's Law

When you have the beginnings of an idea about something, the worst thing to do is to consult "the literature" before you get started to work on it. You are sure to assimilate your potentially original idea to something that is already out there.

Timothy Taylor

Taylor's Law

There are no laws of human behavior.

Carlo Rovelli

Rovelli's Two Principles

Time Does Not Exist

Contrary to what generally assumed, the physical world does not exist "in time". At the basic microscopic level, the world is better described in terms of a a-temporal theory, where physical laws do not express time evolution of physical variables, but just relations between variables. Time emerges only thermodynamically when describing macroscopic variables. Therefore time is only a side effect of our ignorance of the microscopic state of the world. "Time is a side effect of ignorance."

Space Does Not Exist

The physical world does not exist "in space". The physical world is made by an ensemble of particles and fields, which do not live in an external space, but rather live "on each other", and which can be in a relation of contiguity with respect to one another. "Space" is the order implied by this relation. These two principles are implied by what we have learned about the physical world with general relativity and with quantum mechanics. The second principle is largely a return to the Pre-Newtonian relational understanding of space, while the first has few antecendents in our culture.

Karl Sabbagh

Sabbagh's First Law

Never assume.

All the mistakes I have made in my life—not that there are that many, of course—have been because I failed to follow my own law.

Sabbagh's Second Law

The biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has occurred. I think this is the more original and far-reaching of the two laws but I have put it second because it's not really mine. It was said to me by Alan Mulally, an inspiring Boeing manager (and they need inspiring managers at
the moment.)

Roger Schank

Schank's Law

Because people understand by finding in their memories the closest possible match to what they are hearing and use that match as the basis of comprehension, any new idea will be treated as a variant of something the listener has already thought of or heard. Agreement with a new idea means a listener has already had a similar thought and well appreciates that the speaker has recognized his idea. Disagreement means the opposite. Really new ideas are incomprehensible. The good news is that for some people, failure to comprehend is the beginning of understanding. For most, of course, it is the beginning of dismissal.

George B. Dyson

Dyson's Law of Artificial Intelligence

Anything simple enough to be understandable will not be complicated enough to behave intelligently, while anything complicated enough to behave intelligently will not be simple enough to understand.

"I am the Sayer of the Law," said the grey figure.

"Here come all that be new to learn the Law. I sit in the darkness and say the Law."

"It is even so," said one of the beasts in the doorway.

"Evil are the punishments of those who break the Law. None escape."

"None escape," said the Beast Folk, glancing furtively at one another.

"None, none," said the Ape Man. "None escape..."

— H. G. Wells, op. cit., p 67.