If you pay attention to how harmful gurus behave, you’ll start to notice patterns that come up again and again.

Here’s my speculative attempt at categorizing harmful gurus based on their personalities, motivations, and persuasive styles (but not mental health conditions). Of course, not all harmful gurus are equally harmful (I’ll give a mix of very harmful and less harmful examples). My hope is that these categories may help you spot these patterns more easily:

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Type 1: Sociopathic Gurus – they strategically mix lies with truth to get your trust, promote a specific world view, and (eventually) extract value from you. Those who fail to spot their lies learn to trust them and may even see them as brave truth tellers. They lie to you knowingly and without remorse for personal gain.

Strategies they often rely on:

• Cherry picking: using selective (non-representative) examples that suggest the narrative they want you to believe.

• Paltering: making a series of true statements that purposely lead you to come to a false conclusion.

• Lie laundering: inserting key lies among a series of true statements so that the lies go unnoticed and they appear credible.

• Fabrication: they’re willing to completely make up things that very few people would ever blatantly lie about (such as inventing an experience they had with a specific person), leaving trusting people to assume they must be telling the truth.

Famous example:

Larry Ray

“Ray started a sex cult in which he presented himself to students as a former US Marine with training in psychological operations, as well as past work with the Central Intelligence Agency.[24] At first Ray ingratiated himself with his daughter’s friends, cooking dinners and ordering in delivery, and presenting himself as a father figure.”

A psychological examiner’s notes from the time said that Ray was “able to manipulate and control almost any situation in which he finds himself, including a psychological interview with a forensic examiner, no matter how experienced that examiner may be. Mr. Ray is very good at what he does … [He] can be utterly charming, and one can be disarmed by his childlike simplicity and smile. But Mr. Ray is no child; he is a calculating, manipulative and hostile man.”

(source of these quotes: Wikipedia)

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Type 2: Narcissistic Gurus – they’re delusionally convinced of the vast superiority of their ideas and qualities, and do whatever they can to get others to pay attention to and admire them. People end up entranced by their charisma, grandiose vision, and (apparent) confidence. Their huge (but fragile) ego makes it hard for them to learn from (and likely to lash out in response to) valid criticism.

Strategies they often rely on:

• Self-aggrandizement: they tell you how impressive they are or how impressive their ideas are, and some find this convincing.

• Endorsement: they get others to talk up their brilliance and accomplishments, making their claims seem more believable (which are also sometimes mutual exchanges where they talk each other up).

• Obfuscation: using obscure words, ambiguous, smart-seeming remarks, and technical phrases that are hard to understand to seem brilliant and to deflect from having to actually defend their ideas from head-on critiques.

Famous example:

Benny Hinn (prosperity gospel preacher)

Quotes:

“Where in the Bible does it say I have to drive a Honda?”

“When you don’t give money, it shows that you have the devil’s nature”

“The Bible warns us clearly that we must not attack men of God no matter how sinful they may have become or wicked in our eyes.”

“Sow a big seed.  When you confess it, you are activating the supernatural forces of God”

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Type 3: Apophenic Gurus – they read signals into noise, often in paranoid ways. Even though their theories are usually wrong, they are often interesting, novel, or surprising, which gets people to pay attention and leaves some people captivated. They see tenuous connections as deeply meaningful and are rarely persuaded by logical critiques. Some of them tip into genuine psychotic detachment from reality.

Strategies they often rely on:

• Mystery: they present their ideas as involving a deep understanding of hidden relationships or secret knowledge, and leave the impression that if you just spend enough time consuming their content, you’ll come to grasp these important truths that few understand.

• Web of connections: they talk about a wide range of unrelated ideas and events in rapid succession and treat these as deeply connected, making it difficult to pin down their points and giving them an easy escape valve (by diverting to tangential topics they claim are related) when their perspectives are challenged.

• Just asking questions: they’ll point to things that seem weird or surprising or that aren’t well understood, and imply they have deep significance and support their worldview, even though their proper interpretation is unclear.

• Yes And-ing: incorporating other popular false theories and appealing world-views (such as perspectives of other gurus) into their network of ideas, making them even more appealing, fascinating and familiar seeming.

Famous example:

David Icke (conspiracy theorist)

Quotes:

“The opening and closing ceremonies of the London Olympics are mass satanic rituals disguised as a celebration of Britain and sport. Their medium is the language of symbolism.”

“I once had an extraordinary experience with former prime minister Ted Heath. Both of his eyes, including the whites, turned jet black, and I seemed to be looking into two black holes.”

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Type 4: Traumatized Gurus – due to being ostracized by a group or very painful life experiences, they’ve come to demonize a group of people or a set of ideas as the source of society’s ills. They’re on a mission to get others to demonize the same group or ideas. Their own pain and fear leads to black and white thinking and blocks their empathy.

Strategies they often rely on:

• Nutpicking: focusing on the most extreme (nutty) perspectives and people related to whatever it is they demonize to make it seem insane and dangerous.

• Catastrophizing on a slippery slope: claiming that some genuine problems related to a group or set of ideas are going to lead to a sequence of events with a cataclysmic or frightening outcome, causing their audience to fear that group or those ideas.

• Motte and bailey-ing: flip-flopping between reasonable criticisms and extreme conclusions based on those criticisms (which may depend on how emotionally disregulated they are at that moment, or what audience they are talking to), such that when their extreme conclusions are changed, they can easily retreat to “I was just saying that [reasonable criticism].”

Famous example:

Brigitte Gabriel

Her home was destroyed by Muslim militants when she was 10 years old, and she suffered injuries from shrapnel.

Quotes:

“The difference, my friends, between Israel and the Arab world is the difference between civilization and barbarism. It’s the difference between good and evil.. this is what we’re witnessing in the Arabic world, They have no soul, they are dead set on killing and destruction.”

“Every practicing Muslim is a radical Muslim.” (according to the NYT).

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Note that here with this terminology I am not talking about diagnosing mental disorders – I’m talking about how these gurus think, their motivations, and their persuasive styles.

What’s the key difference between these categories? I’d say it’s that they all mislead their audiences, but for different reasons, based on different motivations, and with different levels of self-awareness.

Sociopathic Gurus often mislead on purpose, knowingly, to gain something.

Narcissistic Gurus often mislead due to their egos, and an inflated sense of their own importance and the superiority of their ideas.

Apophenic Gurus often mislead due to seeing false connections, and due to jumping to paranoid conclusions.

And Traumatized Gurus often mislead due to the way their beliefs were shaped by pain or fear, which has caused them to oversimplify, mischaracterize and demonize a particular group or set of ideas.

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Of course, not all gurus can be classified in these ways – some are idiosyncratic.

And, in practice, many gurus combine multiple elements from the above categories, especially the most harmful gurus – for instance, I think that Sociopathic + Narcissistic, and Narcissistic + Apophenic are common combinations among cult leaders in particular. Perhaps having multiple of these tendencies rather than just one (or even having all of these tendencies, though likely to different degrees) is common among the most popular such gurus.

The reason I’m proposing these categories, despite their porousness, is that I think they are useful for thinking about different personalities and tactics common among gurus.

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Here are some examples of what I think are mixed type harmful gurus and how I’d classify them using this framework based on what I know about them (of course, it’s hard to be certain of their true traits beyond their public portrayal of their traits):

• Andrew Tate: Sociopathic + Narcissistic Guru – “Andrew Tate once called his sexually explicit webcam business a ‘total scam’ and boasted on his website that he lured women in by getting them to fall in love with him.  The 36-year-old influencer also boasted on a podcast that he broke a woman’s jaw in a bar fight and ‘got away with it.'” (NBC)

• Alex Jones (radio host): Narcissistic + Apophenic Guru – “We had floods in Texas like fifteen years ago, killed thirty-something people in one night. Turned out it was the Air Force.” and “The reason there’s so many gay people now is because it’s a chemical warfare operation, and I have the government documents where they said they’re going to encourage homosexuality with chemicals so that people don’t have children”.

• Elliot Rodger (mass murderer, became influential post-death): Traumatized + Narcissistic Guru – “All I have ever wanted was to love women, but their behavior has only earned my hatred. I want to have sex with them, and make them feel good, but they would be disgusted at the prospect. They have no sexual attraction towards me. It is such an injustice…Why do they have a perverted sexual attraction for the most brutish of men instead of gentlemen of intelligence? I concluded that women are flawed.”

• L. Ron Hubbard: Sociopathic + Narcissistic Guru – “All women shall succumb to my charms! All mankind shall grovel at my feet and not know why!” (part of his “self-hypnosis”)

• Marshall Applewhite (Heaven’s Gate cult leader): Narcissistic + Apophenic Guru

• Charles Manson (Manson Family cult leader): Sociopathic + Apophenic Guru – “Total paranoia is just total awareness.” and ” I decide who does what and where they do it at. What am I gonna run around like some teeny bopper somewhere for someone elses money? I make the money man; I roll the nickels. The game is mine. I deal the cards.”

• Warren Jeffs (FLDS polygamous offshoot of Mormonism): Sociopathic + Narcissistic Guru

• Keith Raniere (NXIVM cult leader): Sociopathic + Narcissistic Guru

This piece was first written on March 4, 2026, and first appeared on my website on March 30, 2026.

While I’ve spent a bunch of time fact-checking these, I’m very interested in correcting any mistakes I may have inadvertently made. If you catch any mistakes, please let me know what I’m wrong about and what’s actually true.

Facts about the US that contradict commonly believed narratives:

1) Regarding political violence, the majority of Americans see it as…a big problem in society and as being “never justified” (liberals and conservatives agree on this), and the substantial majority view it as “always or usually unacceptable” to be happy about a public figure’s death.

2) The majority of murderers have…prior criminal history (e.g., arrests or convictions), and the substantial majority of homicides are committed by men under 45.

3) More than half of murder victims who were not murdered by a family member…also have prior criminal histories (though, of course, this doesn’t mean that they deserve to be murdered).

4) The majority of homicides are committed due to…personal arguments or are related to drug or gang activity, rather than random acts of violence.

5) School shootings kill…vastly fewer children annually than prosaic dangers like unsafe driving (though it’s a horrifying tragedy each time school shootings occur).

6) Mass murders (where 3 or more people are murdered at the same event) are most often…familicide, where a person kills their family, usually committing suicide afterward.

7) Regarding violence, since the 1990s, America has gotten…far less violent (while there was an uptick during the pandemic around 2020, it is still well below the 1990s peak).

8) Compared to alcohol, homicide leads to the death of…very few people (though it’s terrible whenever homicide occurs).

9) The majority of gun-related deaths are…suicides, not homicides.

10) In rural areas, the suicide rate (per million people) is…highest (urban areas actually have lower rates).

11) The vast majority of reported disappearances of children are…relatives taking a child (e.g., custody disputes) or runaways (rather than kidnappings).

12) Most rapes are carried out by…someone the victim already knows (though in about 1 in 5 cases, the perpetrator is a stranger).

13) Women experiencing sexual assault are not…at all uncommon (more than 20% of adult women have been sexually assaulted at some point in their lives).

14) The most dangerous activity that is very common for people under 30 to engage in on a daily basis is…driving in cars.

15) Commercial airline crashes are…incredibly rare (despite the media attention), and commercial flights are far safer than driving per mile (whereas per hour they are closer to being on par).

16) For adults 25 to 35, the biggest killer is…accidental poisoning (which mostly consists of drug overdoses), not car accidents, and considering the whole adult population, opioid related deaths exceed deaths from motor vehicles.

17) Most personal bankruptcy is related to…sudden job loss or illness (which can simultaneously lead to large medical bills and loss of work).

18) The significant majority of federal taxes that the government collects come from…the top 20% of earners.

19) The percent of Americans who pay no federal income tax is…about 35% (though they still pay payroll taxes and sales taxes, and may pay property taxes and state taxes).

20) Regarding health insurance, the vast majority of Americans…are insured (about 90%), and while some people get extremely screwed by the system by being stuck with huge bills they can’t afford due to unavoidable medical challenges, most Americans say they are satisfied with their health insurance, even though they usually also say that the system overall is substantially flawed and needs significant reforms.

21) Most US federal government spending goes to…social security, health care (e.g., Medicaid/Medicare), military-related expenses (e.g., staff costs, veterans, vehicles), and interest payments on national debt (since interest rates have risen).

22) On average, legal immigrants commit crimes…at a lower rate than natural-born citizens.

23) Where immigration status is reliably recorded, undocumented immigrants have an incarceration rate…lower than that of U.S.-born residents.

24) It’s extremely rare that trans people…get murdered (of course, it’s a horrible tragedy when it does occur, and there are uncertainties around data collection); but current data indicates that suicide is a vastly more common life-threatening risk to trans people, and also, that trans people experience a substantially elevated risk of non-fatal violence compared to cis people.

25) Unarmed Black people who are stopped or engaged by the police have…an extremely low chance of being killed by those police (of course, it’s a horrendous tragedy when it does occur); however, Black people are substantially more likely than white people to be stopped by police without clear cause, and are far more likely than white people to be murdered by criminals.

26) Black Americans mostly want the level of police presence in their area…to stay unchanged (i.e., neither be decreased nor increased), with only about 1 in 5 wanting less policing, though most Black Americans do want other major changes to policing to be made.

27) Currently, much of the recycling that occurs…ends up being wasteful once you factor in all extra fuel burned in order to recycle those materials, the amount of “recycled material” that fails to actually be recycled, and alternative enviromental efforts goverment money spent on recyclying could have gone to instead; whether recycling is effective depends on the region as well as the type of material being recyled (e.g., aluminum is especially useful to recycle, whereas plastic recycling tends to be inefficient).

28) Our landfills are…mostly not close to running out of capacity (and when there are shortages, they are almost always local issues).

29) From a danger perspective, nuclear power is…extremely safe (especially when compared to many other sources of power, like coal), as well as very environmentally friendly (with almost no emissions and reliable solutions for storing the toxic waste produced); new reactor designs are dramatically safer than past ones, yet, nuclear power largely is stopped from being cost-effective due to excessive regulations that are extremely costly to comply with.

30) Almost all suffering that humans cause to domesticated land animals is due to…practices at large farms, such as tiny cages that animals spend almost their whole lives in, or being densely packed together in unpleasant conditions with little to no outdoor access and limited ability to engage in their natural behaviors.

31) Most individuals who experience homelessness are homeless for…less than 12 months, but most of the people you see living on city streets, who are typically the most visible homeless people, are experiencing longer-term homelessness.

32) The majority of people who experience chronic homelessness are either…experiencing a drug addiction or a significant mental health challenge, or both (though for some of these people, the addiction or mental health challenge occurred after homelessness began); a non-negligible percent (perhaps 20%, but estimates differ substantially) have neither challenge.

33) The primary causes of high housing prices are…factors that increase the costs of building new housing or that completely prevent it from being built (such as zoning, excessive regulations, lengthy approval processes, and local opposition), as well as, for popular places like New York City, net migration into those areas.

34) The majority of people in prison in the US at any given moment are there for…violent crimes, not non-violent drug-related crimes or victimless offenses – while the substantial majority of convictions are for non-violent crimes (since most crime is non-violent), violent crime typically carries much longer sentences.

35) Almost nobody who is charged with a crime goes to…trial (they mostly take plea bargains).

36) The significant majority of people who are charged with a serious crime and go to trial are…convicted.

37) Regarding the US federal minimum wage, very…few people actually get paid that amount (in part due to higher minimum wages that many states have, and in part due to naturally occurring labor market prices that are simply higher than the federal minimum).

This piece was first written on November 2, 2025, and first appeared on my website on November 17, 2025.

1) Narcissistic deceivers: they don’t track or even consider whether what they are saying is true; they say what feels good to them. This relates to what philosophers call “bullshitting” (as opposed to “lying”).

Some well-known politicians fall into this camp.

2) Psychopathic deceivers: they know they are saying false things but don’t care and are just saying whatever best serves their own agenda. They don’t experience guilt about lying.

Some popular media personalities fall into this camp.

3) Motivated deceivers: they know they are lying and feel bad about it (when they think about it), but they think it’s worth lying because the cause is too important or there is too much to be lost if they don’t lie, or there’s something important to them to gain by lying.

Some leaders of organizations fall into this camp.

4) Delusional deceivers: they have lost touch with reality, usually due to mental health problems (such as psychosis) or extremely heavy drug use. They are often paranoid.

Some famous authors fall into this camp.

5) Believing deceivers: they’ve been convinced of false information through propaganda, idealism, cognitive dissonance, trusting unreliable sources, or social forces/pressures and genuinely believe it’s the truth. They aren’t delusional or evil, just (potentially very) misled.

Many people on all political sides are like this. This is, in my view, by far the most common reason individuals spread misinformation, though it may not be the most common reason that public figures spread misinformation.

Whether you are working to combat misinformation or just trying to understand it, it’s useful to know what you’re dealing with. Spreaders of misinformation come in very different forms and have very different reasons for doing so.

This piece was first written on March 22, 2025, and first appeared on my website on April 22, 2025.

For instance, I just made up these stories that I’ve never heard of ever happening:

• a young child stealing their mother’s car

• a dog discovering buried treasure

And indeed, with a quick search I can confirm that these things seem to really have happened!

Though, of course, this won’t always be the case since the number of human events still pales in comparison to the number of concepts that can be mixed – for instance, I couldn’t find even one documented case of “a clown being killed by bees” (though I’m confident that at some point in history, someone was dressed in a clown suit when a bee stung them).

In any event, the preponderance of events on our planet means that something happening one single time tells us almost nothing. Having happened once is a very low bar.

And yet, to make a point in a way that people find compelling, it’s sometimes mandatory (or close to it) to give real-world examples that demonstrate the point.

This creates an awkward tension where a single real-world example often has almost no evidentiary value but has substantial persuasive power.

There are some special cases where an anecdote can provide meaningful evidence. For instance, when the anecdote is so well documented or reliable that you know it happened AND the outcome couldn’t reasonably have been caused by anything other than through the explanation the anecdote provides – such as a case study in a hospital where some experimental new treatment saves a patient with a previously incurable disease. Or when you yourself have tried something once (e.g., a self-help technique), and it seemed to work well, and that is sufficient justification for trying it again.

But in most cases, despite their usefulness in making a compelling point, anecdotes should be thought of as a way to imagine something more vividly and see more clearly specific ways it can manifest, not as evidence for something being true. They are important when explaining a concept, but usually not because they provide evidence of its validity.

This piece was first written on September 13, 2024, and first appeared on my website on October 11, 2024.

Note (March 26, 2023): I first wrote this list on December 3, 2022. Since then, GPT-4 has come out, and several of the points in this list are closer to happening. For example, point #2 is partly true already, thanks to Bing Chat (which runs on GPT-4).

Here are nine ways I think that AIs that generate text (like GPT-3) will have a >50% chance of changing the world for the better and worse in the next ten years:

#1: The internet will get flooded with AI-written articles, and you often won’t know if you’re reading something written by a human.

#2: Search engines will generate answers to your questions on the fly (from scratch) instead of just showing a list of websites to you and instead of using pre-extracted answers. Google will have to adapt, or it may finally lose its dominance.

#3: Cheating on school essays will become rampant, as AIs will be able to get students good grades in many classes (at negligible cost), and it will be very hard to detect such cheating since each essay will be unique.

#4: You will be able to train an AI on samples of your own writing, give it a new essay title and a bulleted list of points you want to make in the essay, and it will write a pretty high-quality essay covering all the points you listed, in a style that matches your own writing.

#5: Spam messages (and text-based phishing attacks) will become unique. Rather than sending the same message to each person, spam will be unique for each recipient. And it may even have its style adapted to what is known about each recipient (e.g., demographics).

#6: Propaganda on social media will start to become automated. Rather than bad actors having hundreds of people on their payroll to promote a viewpoint, they’ll replace them with larger swarms of human-seeming bots that each act uniquely.

#7: AIs will be fine-tuned on our own personal email corpus, and then (much of the time) you’ll be able to start with an automatically generated first draft of email replies rather than having to write emails from scratch or receiving mere sentence-level suggestions.

#8: The text of ads will get automatically edited/rewritten by AI to be fine-tuned to different audiences to help maximize clicks.

#9: AIs will start being used in education as digital private tutors to explain concepts to students, re-explain things and simplify explanations when a student is confused, point out mistakes made by students, etc.

We’re entering a wild time when it comes to AI. Its effects on our lives will be felt more and more, to say the least.

If you read this line, please do us a favor and click here to answer one quick question.

(A) Collective Action Problems, where many individuals or groups are currently better off taking action X, even though they’d be better off in the long-term if everyone agreed not to take action X.

Some of the big challenges with Collective Actions Problems are (i) getting people or groups to agree to stop the behavior in the first place, and then (ii) creating a very strong commitment mechanism so that the parties don’t just later defect against the agreement.

(B) Incentive Misalignment Problems, where many individuals or groups are currently better off taking action X, even though such actions harm the rest of society broadly.

The big challenge with an Incentive Misalignment Problem is finding some way to align the incentives of individuals and groups with the incentives of society as a whole.

Unfortunately, we humans seem to be quite bad at solving these kinds of problems on a society-wide scale much of the time (we are better at solving them on smaller scales, such as within companies and within families).

I think that figuring out how to better solve Collective Action Problems and Incentive Misalignment Problems is extremely important for the future of humanity.

Here’s my list of some of the major unsolved problems in the world right now that are of these types:

(A) Collective Action Problems

1. The development of nuclear weapons (e.g., North Korea developed them pretty recently, Iran may still develop them, the U.S. and China may still develop more of them, etc.). We would all be safer if countries could somehow credibly commit to getting rid of their nuclear weapons and never making trying to make them again.

2. Arms race dynamics in the development of advanced A.I. (e.g., where players feel rushed by competition instead of proceeding cautiously and cooperating on the numerous safety challenges).

(B) Incentive Misalignment Problems

3. Publication of risky forms of “gain-of-function” research (where researchers find ways to make viruses more infectious or more deadly to humans) and other forms of bioresearch that might threaten our species.

4. Products being optimized to generate craving, immediate hyper-stimulation, and/or addiction at the expense of long-term consumer benefit (e.g., junk food, some social media, clickbait, some video games, etc.).

5. The creation of animal products involving what seems to be vast amounts of suffering (e.g., keeping an animal in a tiny cage its whole life so that a human can spend 30 mins enjoying eating it).

7. The incentive that many groups and individuals have to spread false, misleading, and/or politically biased information; this bad information sometimes overwhelms the spread of true information on the same topics (leading to bad decisions, misinformed voters, and polarization).

8. Over-focus on the short-term welfare of society at the expense of the long term (including our own lives in 10-20 years’ time and future generations).

(C) Hybrid Collective Action Problems + Incentive Misalignment Problems

9. Running a highly risky environmental experiment with the stupendous quantity of greenhouse gases we dump into our atmosphere. If we could cooperate on taking the most cost-effective actions that reduce greenhouse gas emissions, we could greatly reduce the risk. But this is not strictly a collective action problem, as there are some companies and people who would be individually better off continuing to pollute tremendous amounts (and the personal benefits to them would likely offset the projected negative impacts of global warming on them).

10. The disturbingly high levels of false results that seem to be present in various branches of science (e.g., ~40% of claims from social science papers in top journals appear not to replicate, and an even higher percentage fail to replicate in preclinical cancer biology). Even those who want to change their practices often find themselves stuck in a system that rewards shoddy practices that produce compelling-seeming results.

This piece was first written on November 16, 2020, and first appeared on this site on May 13, 2022.

2. Double check claims before repeating them

3. Don’t share articles unless we’ve read them (i.e., not just because we like a headline)

4. Take a breather before responding when we feel angry (in person and on social media)

5. Remember that groups are purposely trying to feed us appealing disinformation (that exploits our preconceptions and biases), intending to create chaos

6. Read multiple news sources with differing perspectives

7. Go to the unedited video/text (whenever available) before jumping to conclusions about an event or person’s actions

8. Remember that the majority of the people we disagree with are not bad people, even if we think their policy positions are wrong and harmful

9. Recall that we can rarely validly generalize from one example, no matter how upsetting that example is

10. Condemn physical violence – it is not a solution to our problems, and it can make them rapidly spiral out of control

This piece was first written on November 3, 2020, and first appeared on this site on June 3, 2022.

1. Parkinson’s Law: Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.
2. Hofstadter’s Law: It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.
3. Gates’ Law: Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years.
4. Goodhart’s Law: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
5. Hanlon’s Razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity (or, don’t invoke conspiracy when ignorance and incompetence will suffice, as conspiracy implies intelligence).
6. Acton’s Dictum: Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
7. Amara’s Law: We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.
8. Benford’s Law: In a diverse collection of unrelated statistics, a given statistic has roughly a 30% chance of starting with the digit 1.
9. Betteridge’s Law: Any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word ‘no’.
10. Brooks’ Law: Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.
11. Chesterton’s Fence: Reforms should not be made until the reasoning behind the existing state of affairs is understood.
12. Claasen’s Law: Usefulness = log(technology).
13. Clarke’s First Law: 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 Rule: Nothing but logical impossibilities have a prior probability of 0 or 1.
15. Cunningham’s Law: 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 Law: 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. Dunbar’s Number: Most people can’t maintain stable social relationships with more than 150 people.
18. Eroom’s Law: Drug discovery is becoming slower and more expensive over time, despite improvements in technology.
19. Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect: 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 Law (or the Expert Witness Law): For each PhD (to use as an expert witness for one side) there’s an equal and opposite PhD.
21. Godwin’s Law: As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.
22. Morley-Souter’s Law (Rule 34): There is porn of it (no exceptions).
23. Greenspun’s Tenth Rule: Any sufficiently complicated C program contains an ad hoc, informally specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.
24. Hebb’s Law: Neurons that fire together wire together.
25. Hubble’s Law: Galaxies recede from an observer at a rate proportional to their distance to that observer.
26. Hume’s Guillotine (Is-Ought Problem): Normative statements (about what’s moral/immoral/right/wrong) cannot be deduced exclusively from descriptive statements.
27. Humphrey’s Law: Conscious attention to a task normally performed automatically can impair its performance.
28. Kranzberg’s Law: Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.
29. Lamarck’s Principle (or “Use it or Lose it”): Use it or lose it (evolutionarily speaking, but also in the brain).
30. Lewis’s Law: The comments you’ll inevitably find on any article about feminism justify feminism.
31. Littlewood’s Law: Individuals can expect miracles to happen to them, at the rate of about one per month.
32. Maes–Garreau Law: 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 Law: The value of a system grows as approximately the square of the number of users of the system.
34. Miller’s Law: To understand what another person is saying, you must assume that it is true and try to imagine what it could be true of.
35. Moore’s Law: Computation per dollar grows exponentially (or: number of transistors per circuit doubles roughly every 24 months).
36. Murphy’s Law: Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.
37. Alder’s Law: What cannot be settled by experiment is not worth debating.
38. O’Sullivan’s Law: All organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing.
39. Pareto’s Principle (80/20 Rule): For many phenomena 80% of consequences stem from 20% of the causes.
40. Peter’s Principle: In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.
41. Poisson’s Law (or Law of Large Numbers): For independent random variables with a common distribution, the average tends to the mean as sample size increases.
42. Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy: In bureaucracy, those devoted to the bureaucracy get control, those devoted to what it’s supposed to achieve lose influence.
43. Putt’s Law: 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 Effect (Pygmalion Effect): High expectations lead to an increase in performance, low expectations to a decrease in performance.
45. Schneier’s Law: Any person can invent a security system so clever that she or he can’t think of how to break it.
46. Shermer’s Law: Any sufficiently advanced extraterrestrial intelligence is indistinguishable from God.
47. Zipf’s Law: 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 Law: Software gets slower more quickly than hardware gets faster.
49. Sturgeon’s Law: Ninety percent of everything is crud.
50. Stigler’s Law: No discovery is named after its original discoverer, including this one.

This piece was first written on July 6, 2020, and first appeared on my website on May 30, 2026.