The Laws of Chaos

8 minutes

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Murphy's Law: Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.
Yhprum's Law: Anything that can work, will work.
Sod's Law: The worst possible outcome tends to happen at the worst possible moment.
Finagle's Law: Anything that can go wrong, will — at the worst possible time.
Gilbert's Law: The biggest problem with a job is that nobody tells you what it is.
Hanlon's Razor: Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence.
Parkinson's Law of Triviality (Bikeshedding): People spend more time discussing trivial matters than important ones.

Parkinson's Law: Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.
Hofstadter's Law: Everything takes longer than you expect, even when you take Hofstadter's Law into account.
Student Syndrome: People start working seriously only when the deadline becomes urgent.
Carlson's Law: Interrupted work takes longer than uninterrupted work.
Illich's Law: After a certain number of hours, productivity falls sharply.
Meskimen's Law: There's never enough time to do it right, but always enough time to do it over.

Brooks's Law: Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later. (Corollary: Nine women cannot make a baby in one month.)
Conway's Law: Systems mirror the communication structure of the organizations that build them.
Gall's Law: A complex system that works evolved from a simple system that worked.
Zawinski's Law: Every program attempts to expand until it can read email.
Knuth's Optimization Principle: Premature optimization is the root of much evil.
Kernighan's Law: Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place.

Occam's Razor: The simplest explanation is usually the best.
Hitchens's Razor: What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
Chesterton's Fence: Don't remove something until you understand why it was put there.
Goodhart's Law: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
Cobra Effect: Incentives often produce the opposite of the intended result.
Dunning-Kruger Effect: People with low competence tend to overestimate their competence.
Law of Unintended Consequences: Actions often have consequences that were not anticipated.

Peter Principle: People are promoted until they reach their level of incompetence.
Dilbert Principle: The least competent people are often promoted into management.
Shirky Principle: Institutions preserve the problem they were created to solve.
Price's Law: A small fraction of people often produce a large fraction of results.
Pareto Principle (80/20 Rule): Roughly 80% of effects come from 20% of causes.
Parkinson's Second Law: Expenditure rises to meet income.

Parkinson's Law of Meetings: Time spent discussing an item is inversely proportional to its importance.
Law of Bureaucratic Displacement: The process becomes more important than the result.
Committee Principle: A camel is a horse designed by a committee.
Iron Law of Oligarchy: Every organization eventually becomes dominated by a small group.

Keynes's Market Observation: The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.
Maximum Pain Theory: Markets often move where the largest number of traders lose money.
Recency Bias: People expect recent trends to continue indefinitely.
Taxi Driver Indicator: When everyone is giving stock tips, caution is warranted.
Greater Fool Theory: One can profit from overvalued assets if a greater fool will buy later.
Law of Mean Reversion: Extreme market moves tend to move back toward average levels over time.

Gumperson's Law: The probability that something will happen is inversely proportional to its desirability.
Sturgeon's Law: Ninety percent of everything is crap.
Sayre's Law: In any dispute, the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake.
Observation Selection Effect: You notice things only after becoming aware of them.
Law of Familiarity: The more often people see something, the more they tend to like it.

Cunningham's Law: The best way to get the right answer online is to post the wrong answer.
Metcalfe's Law: The value of a network grows roughly with the square of the number of users.
Moore's Law: Computing power tends to double roughly every two years.
Wirth's Law: Software becomes slower faster than hardware becomes faster.
Etorre's Observation: The other line always moves faster.
Betteridge's Law of Headlines: Any headline ending with a question mark can usually be answered with "No."

Ninety-Ninety Rule: The first 90% of a project (or code) takes 90% of the time; the remaining 10% takes the other 90% of the time.
Law of Project Schedules: The later a project is, the more effort is spent explaining why it is late.
Iron Triangle: You can optimize only two of: fast, cheap, good.

All Models Are Wrong: All models are wrong, but some are useful.
Garbage In, Garbage Out (GIGO): Bad inputs produce bad outputs.
Streetlight Effect: People search where it is easiest to look rather than where the answer is likely to be.
McNamara Fallacy: Making decisions based only on measurable data while ignoring important unmeasurable factors.
Law of Instrument: If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.