(1) Parkinson’s: work expands to fill the time available for its completion
(2) Hofstadter’s: it always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law
(3) Gates’s: most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years
(4) Goodhart’s: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure
(5) Hanlon’s: never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity (or, don’t invoke conspiracy when ignorance and incompetence suffice, as conspiracy implies intelligence)
(6) Acton’s: power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely
(7) Amara’s: we tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run
(8) Benford’s: in a diverse collection of unrelated statistics, a given statistic has roughly a 30% chance of starting with the digit 1
(9) Betteridge’s: any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered with the word ‘no’
(10) Brooks’s: adding manpower to a late software project makes it later
(11) Chesterson’s: reforms should not be made until the reasoning behind the existing state of affairs is understood
(12) Claasen’s: usefulness = log(technology)
(13) Clarke’s: when a distinguished elderly scientist states that something is possible, they are almost certainly right, but when they state something is impossible, they are probably wrong
(14) Cromwell’s: nothing but logical impossibilities have a prior probability of 0 or 1
(15) Cunningham’s: the best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question; it’s to post the wrong answer
(16) Doctorow’s: when someone puts a lock on a thing you own, against your wishes, and doesn’t give you the key, they’re not doing it for your benefit
(17) Moore’s: computation per dollar grows exponentially (or: number of transistors per circuit doubles roughly every 24 months)
(18) Eroom’s: drug discovery is becoming slower and more expensive over time, despite improvements in technology
(19) Gell-Mann’s: you’ll believe articles outside your area of expertise, even after acknowledging that neighboring articles in your area of expertise are completely wrong
(20) Gibson’s: for each PhD (to use as an expert witness for one side), there exists an equal and opposite PhD
(21) Godwin’s: as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one
(22) Miller’s: to understand what another person is saying, you must assume that it is true and try to imagine what it could be true of
(23) Greenspun’s: any sufficiently complicated C program contains an ad hoc, informally specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp
(24) Hebb’s: neurons that fire together wire together
(25) Hubble’s: galaxies recede from an observer at a rate proportional to their distance to that observer
(26) Hume’s: normative statements (about what’s moral/immoral) cannot be deduced exclusively from descriptive statements
(27) Humphrey’s: conscious attention to a task normally performed automatically can impair its performance
(28) Kranzberg’s: technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral
(29) Lamarck’s: use it or lose it (evolutionarily speaking, but also in the brain)
(30) Lewis’s: the comments you’ll inevitably find on any article about feminism justify feminism
(31) Littlewood’s: individuals can expect miracles to happen to them, at the rate of about one per month
(32) Maes–Garreau’s: favorable predictions about future technology will fall at the latest possible date they can come true and still remain in the lifetime of the predictor
(33) Metcalfe’s: the value of a networked system grows as approximately the square of the number of users of the system
(34) Morley-Souter’s: there is porn of it (no exceptions)
(35) Dunbar’s: most people can’t maintain stable social relationships with more than 150 people
(36) Murphy’s: anything that can go wrong will go wrong
(37) Alder’s: what cannot be settled by experiment (at least in principle) is not worth debating
(38) O’Sullivan’s: all organizations that are not explicitly right-wing will over time become left-wing
(39) Pareto’s: for many phenomena, 80% of consequences stem from 20% of the causes (or: most of the effects are produced by just a few of the causes)
(40) Peter’s: in a hierarchy, every employee tends to be promoted to his level of incompetence
(41) Pourenelle’s: in bureaucracy, those devoted to the bureaucracy tend to gain and keep control, while those devoted to the goals they are supposed to be achieving tend to lose influence
(42) Poisson’s: for independent random variables with a common distribution, the average of these tends to the true mean as sample size increases
(43) Putt’s: technology is dominated by two types of people; those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand
(44) Rosenthal’s: high expectations lead to an increase in performance; low expectations lead to a decrease in performance
(45) Schneier’s: any person can invent a security system so clever that she or he can’t think of how to break it
(46) Shermer’s: any sufficiently advanced extraterrestrial intelligence is indistinguishable from God
(47) Zipf’s: the frequency of use of the nth-most-frequently-used word in any natural language is approximately inversely proportional to n (few words are used often; most are used rarely)
(48) Wirth’s: software gets slower more quickly than hardware gets faster
(49) Sturgeon’s: ninety percent of everything is crud
(50) Stigler’s: no discovery is named after its original discoverer, including this one

If you liked this piece, you may also like Twelve Recursive Explanations.

I know of 8 approaches to interpreting the U.S. Constitution (and its amendments). None is obviously correct; some are more popular than others, but all are, in some unsatisfying sense, an arbitrary choice we could make:

(1) What the authors believed their words were literally saying (for instance, by studying what is known about how James Madison interpreted his writing). Because that tells us what the documents were intended to say.

(2) What the authors were trying to achieve on behalf of our country by writing those words (for instance, by studying what is known about why Alexander Hamilton thought certain things should be in the Constitution). Because this takes into account the spirit, rather than just the letter, of the law.

(3) What did the ratifiers / those who voted to approve the amendments interpret the words as meaning? Because that takes into account the reasons why the documents were actually accepted as law.

(4) What those who first enforced each of the different terms of these documents interpreted them to mean. Because that tells us what the documents first actually meant in practice.

(5) What decisions in our courts most recently interpreted the words to mean? Because that represents the current theoretical state of the law (even though it sometimes changes). There are, of course, good reasons to think we should implement the law as court decisions indicate. What I’m referring to here is something different, namely, when one says that the “correct” interpretations of the Constitution are automatically what the courts have most recently decided they are.

(6) What most people today would interpret the words to mean, if the words are taken at their face value in modern English. Because this is what those words actually mean to us when we read them.

(7) Whichever method of interpretation listed above causes an interpretation most like what we wish the documents said, accompanied by us then arguing that this is always the correct approach to interpretation. This one is especially popular.

(8) Decide what we think the Constitution should have said, then try to find some interpretation of the words that at least sort of makes it sound like it’s saying those things.

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It would be nice if the Constitution told us which of these methods to use to interpret its pages (though I imagine we’d end up just debating what THOSE words mean too).

It would be even better if we could decide which of these methods would actually produce better outcomes for our society. That’s unfortunately very hard to do.

To some extent, the choice for how to interpret the Constitution hinges on how much we value stability of interpretation (which makes the law more understandable and consistent) vs. achieving certain outcomes we desire (e.g., making sure there are strong protections for things that society feels should be protected). But this dichotomy is not sufficient to allow us to choose between all the different interpretative methods, in my opinion.

Usually, we either seem to treat the Constitution as though it is not ambiguous (a theory that’s unfortunately been falsified) or as though one of these approaches is the “right” way to do it, as though there could be such a thing as one “right” way to interpret an ambiguous document.

This piece was first written on March 20, 2018, and first appeared on my website on September 4, 2025.