(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.

Here are eight common and slick-sounding claims that I think are misleading, along with a very clunky alternative for each that I think is truer and more useful:

1. “You’ll regret the things you didn’t do more than the things you did” -> don’t try to minimize the amount of regret you’ll have – try to maximize the total amount of the things that you value.
2. “Opposites attract” -> birds of a feather flock together (in fact, only a few types of opposites actually attract).
3. “Don’t let fear stop you” -> don’t let fear stop you when you’re afraid of doing valuable things that aren’t actually risky, and in those cases, try to ignore your fear and act in spite of it even though it may feel extremely shitty to do so.
4. “Trust your emotions” -> your emotions signal useful information about your needs and your beliefs about the world, so it’s really important to learn to notice them and understand what they are telling you…but don’t assume your emotions accurately reflect reality either, since they sometimes are much stronger than reality warrants (e.g., excessive fear of something that’s totally safe), or are the result of pattern recognition gone haywire (e.g., you get a bad feeling about someone because they have irrelevant similarities to another person who hurt you), or are impacted by random factors (e.g., feeling anger that’s caused more by hunger than by what the anger is fixated on).
5. “Believe your intuition” -> believe your intuition in situations you’ve experienced many times before, where there was enough feedback on how well your predictions performed to allow your intuition to have become honed (e.g., when interpreting the behavior of people you know well in common social situations, but not when evaluating if a complex philosophical claim is likely to be true), as well as in cases where there is no time to think things through carefully (e.g., if a yelling person leaps out in front of you and your intuition tells you that you’re in danger).
6. “Love happens when you’re not looking for it” -> desperation tends to be unattractive and can lead to bad, rash romantic decision making, so be cautious if you’re feeling that way and consider working on those feelings before seeking a partner, but on the other hand, the more people you meet, the more likely you are to meet someone you hit it off with, and that’s true even if you feel desperate
7. “Absence makes the heart grow fonder” -> absence often makes the heart grow fonder…at first…and then, “out of sight, out of mind,” because eventually you get used to life without that person and it gets easier to be away from them and move on.
8. “Everything that happens happens for the best” -> bad things happen frequently that are truly not good, but you can often learn useful things from bad experiences, and it’s really worthwhile to actively look for what those learnings are. Plus, it is often possible to think differently about bad things in such a way as to reduce the suffering that they cause, and it’s often extremely worthwhile to do so when you can without deceiving yourself (e.g., remembering all the other things you are grateful for, or noticing the beneficial silver linings that resulted from the bad thing).