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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 in one field, it is probably true in others.
You can learn a lot about your field, regardless of what your field is by studying lots of other fields, because so many fields are just under this wide 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 blinds 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 is share with you a handful of laws.
Most of these are laws that certain specific scientists coined and often named after themselves from a huge variety of fields, as you'll 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.
Alright, let's jump right into this.
Number one, maybe my favorite one that we'll talk about today, it's called Brandolini's law in its state's quote, the amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.
This was coined by the Italian software developer Albert Brandolini who also refers to it as the bullshit asymmetry principle.
No matter what field you're in, you can relate to that.
Now this is common in every field and the non -saturical version acknowledges four truths.
The first is that people don't like to admit that they don't understand something.
They don't want to 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 the question 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 or wherever it is, who is allowed to give an opinion but the critic is the one who must debunk them with evidence.
It's the opposite of what happens in a rational setting like the courtroom.
Third, there is a thriving market for bad commentary.
because bad commentary, wrong commentary, gives readers intellectual cover against their own biases and their prejudice and their incentives.
And so when many people want bad commentary or let's say bullshit to be right they want it to be right it becomes much harder to convince them that it's wrong.
And last the barriers to entry to 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 hear it.
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, and it's 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 Bernadini's Law comes into play.
all right number two it's called Littlewood's law which basically says that we can expect miracles to happen all the time because in a world with 7 billion people in it the odds of a 1 in a billion event are actually pretty good.
John Littlewood was a mathematician who was trying to debunk the idea of miracles being anything than just simple statistics.
Now many years ago the physicist Freeman Dyson wrote about Littlewood's laws and he wrote, quote, Littlewood's 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 30 ,000 per day, or about a million per month.
The chance of a miracle is about 1 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 when you're watching global news, it's going to highlight the one in a billion event that's happening somewhere in the world right now.
And it 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 going to be drawn to the one in a billion event that by simple statistics happens every single day.
Daniel Kahneman, the great psychologist, has a related take to this.
He says, quote, human beings cannot comprehend very large or very small numbers.
It would be useful for us to acknowledge that fact.
All right, moving on.
Number three. This one's called DOLO's Law, which is in evolution it means an organism cannot re -evolve to a former state because the path that led to its former estate was so complicated that the odds of retracing that exact path round to zero.
So let me explain what I mean by that.
Say an animal has a tail, and then it evolves to lose that tail.
The odds that it will ever evolve to regain a tail are basically zero.
Because the path that originally gave it it's tail was so complex it cannot be recreated.
I often think about this in culture and economics and business.
It happens a lot of times to business.
There are things where once you lose them, they will never be regained.
Because the chain of events that created them in the first place cannot be easily replicated.
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's where 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 low to begin with.
So once you lose it, regaining it is so difficult just because the odds of ever getting it in the first place were so low.
Teams and teamwork and culture can be another one of these things that really fits into DOLO's law where success is often personalized 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 all the recognition, right?
And many star employees have joined another firm, you know, they were the superstars at one firm and they join another company, 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 lose them, it is very hard to regain them.
Alright, moving on.
Number, what is this?
Three, four? I don't know.
It doesn't matter. Parkinson's law, which states that work expands to fill the time available for its completion.
I am such a victim of this, a product of this, where if you give me a deadline, I won't wait until the very last second to do it, be very careful with the deadlines that you give me.
In 1955 historian Cyril 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, may in this fashion leave another person prostrate 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 until the last second in procrastinate forever.
This point I think was that resources can exceed needs without people even noticing it.
So as 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, it's often just related to how much money they have.
If the corporation has a lot of money, a lot of profits, they raised a lot of money, they're going to hire a lot of 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 of years ago when Elon Musk fired what was it, 2 thirds of Twitter.
People were like, well, that's the end of the company, the product's not gonna work anymore.
And actually it did.
And it still does even after you fired 75 % of the people.
Several corollaries 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.
I'm going to need that.
Well, no, you don't.
It's just because you have the money to do it.
The same is for expectations and success.
So in IT data can expand to fill a given level of storage.
So I would probably be completely fine if my iPhone only held 200 photos.
I would be okay with that.
And I would delete all the bad ones so that I'll only have 200 good photos.
But because it has so much storage, I have, I don't know, 10 ,000 photos, 9 ,000 of which are bad photos that I won't care about in the future.
So what I'm willing to hold, expands to how much I have, and that is true in so many fields.
All right, next one, and I love this one, it's called Sarah's 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 more trivial the issue, the more emotional you're gonna get about it.
In 1973, The Wall Street Journal wrote, quote, "...academics love to lay down laws.
One of the more famous is attributed to the late Wallace Sayer of Columbia University.
Sayer's Third Law of Politics—no one seems to remember what the first two were—states that…academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics, because the stakes are so low." Now, the logic of Sayers Law might go something like this.
When the stakes are actually high, people within a culture have a pretty good track record of putting more of their differences aside for a common cause.
That was true during World War II, that was true in the early days of COVID at least.
You bicker when there is little downside to doing so.
But when things get real, people tend to come together and figure things out.
Remember the day after 9 -11 I think all of Congress held hands on the steps of the Capitol and saying, God bless America.
When things are bad, people come together.
But when the stakes are low, it's much easier to become emotional and argumentative.
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 fret about, and to argue about.
And that's why the lower the stakes, the more emotional people tend to get about an issue.
All right next one, this one's called Stigler's law.
It states that no scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer.
University of Chicago's statistician Steven Stigler coined this law, and for consistency he says that he actually stole it from Robert Merton.
Stigler writes in his book about statistics.
He writes, quote, examples affirming this principle must be known to every scientist with even a passing interest in history of his subject.
In fact, I suspect that most historians of science, both amateur and 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 their result's 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.
Steven Johnson, the great author, he writes in his book How We Got to Now that quote, innovations usually begin life with an attempt to solve a specific problem, but once they get into circulation, they end up triggering other changes that would have been extremely difficult to predict.
An innovation or cluster of innovations in one field ends up triggering changes that seem to belong to a different domain altogether.
So taking other people's work and and 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 will always get more credit than we deserve because otherwise the story is too complicated.
Like, it's a great story to just say Steve Jobs made the iPhone.
And it's directionally true, but no, thousands of people worked on the iPhone, right?
The other thing, and I think this is more applicable to Stigler's Law, is the long history of the crowned winner is the person who just communicated the idea the best and 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.
Next, these ones are called Mill Mistakes, which is, assuming the familiar is the optimal.
James Mill was a 19th century Scottish economist who reasoned that a constitutional monarchy was the highest natural form of government that existed.
Now, he had his logic in arguing whether he was right or wrong is not the point, but in In his book At Home in the Universe, Stuart Koffman makes a really good observation about James Mill.
He said, quote, ''James Mill once deduced from what he considered indisputable 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 deducing the optimal from the familiar.
Let's call this a Mill mistake.
God knows we all suffer the danger." Of course we do, right?
What you're familiar with will create the most coherent story in your head that, look, this government works and 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 give extra credit points over other ideas that might actually be better and hold more water, but they're harder to contextualize.
Daniel Kahneman 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.
Kahneman summed this up by saying this great quote.
He says quote, But what we see is all there is.
At least that's what we assume.
What we see, what we've experienced makes the most sense so we assume it's the best.
Alright, last one. This one's called Hickam's Law.
It says that problems in complex systems rarely have one cause.
Ockham's razor in medicine, guides doctors to a diagnostic rule of thumb that's basically along the lines of, if there are several explanations for a patient's symptoms, choose the one that makes the fewest assumptions.
This is known as diagnostic partsimony.
John Hickam, who came up with this law, 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 ailments than one single rare one.
So the push to get to one big idea, one cause of their ailments and their underlying cause can lead to false precision.
At best, if not misdiagnosis altogether.
He pointed out that the human body has 11 systems.
It has 79 organs. It has 206 bones and 600 different muscles.
And you can extend this to a global economy which has more than 7 billion people and around 200 million businesses.
So you do the math.
What are the odds that one single ailment 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.
