1. "Curse of Development" from Gervais, The depth of any transaction is limited by the depth of the shallower party. If the situational developmental gap between two people is sufficiently small, the more evolved person will systematically lose. https://dustingetz.com/d4337a942961484b8b408d4b1963e161
Thoreau's Law "If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life" (for some reason nobody properly coined this?)
With all sincerity, here is another one from Church's extended works.
Church's Fundamental Theorem of Employment: A person is hired to do work that the hiring person (a) cannot do for himself, or (b) does not want to do. P.S. It is extremely important to know which of the two is the case. https://archive.fo/RSM0Z
Mike Test: Healthy workplace culture is defined by willingness to hire superior men even if credit is not given for such acts. archive: https://archive.fo/lbxji
Request for coinage: The writerly bias, or "Only important intellectuals and artists write or create works on the human condition that are well remembered, but most people are neither important artists or intellectuals, thus we should expect cultural understandings of the human condition to be jaundiced with the perspective of artists and intellectuals." https://philosophybear.substack.com/p/just-three-dumb-guy-thoughts-i-had
If you diss the Man, then do not trust the Man. Plan your parry to their counter-attack before they know you exist. You can't rebel alone. Seek rich friends, powerful allies and independent sanctuaries. There is no such thing as a free lunch, a fair fight or an unmixed motive. https://paradox-point.blogspot.com/2013/07/three-whistleblowers.html
The myth is that lowering barriers of access to producing, universalising access to production, depresses wages and devalues the product. When you remove all barriers of access to something, the general quality nosedives. It’s presented as universal access, freedom, the American dream - everyone can become pewdiepie if they just pick themselves up by the bootstraps. https://eggreport.substack.com/p/the-attention-economy-1-devaluation?s=r
Being at the bottom of a hierarchy is stressful, and this is true, but only within an impedance matched band of 1-point on a log scale. But at a log band of 2 or higher, it’s not stressful, just plain confusing and clumsy protocol wise. Three solutions emerge: patronage, gentry theater, highlighting inequality. https://archive.ph/eOjAX
A rule of thumb in the teaching profession states that to be an effective teacher at a given level, you need to have studied 5 years beyond that level. This has nothing to do with subject-matter expertise, and everything to do with trying to exit the Curse of Development zone. https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/04/14/the-gervais-principle-iii-the-curse-of-development/
The sociopath move of course is to mediocritize yourself the hell away from this whole thing, but the number of places you can hide out profitably while this stuff blows over is shrinking. And directly profiteering of the culture wars goes beyond sociopathy to masochism. https://archive.ph/p5eqUhttps://archive.fo/1uy2f
You learn the negative sum game, striving hard to make it to zero-sum at least. Enlightened temporary exit to go find a kobayashi maru cheat code. Return to break through to positive-sum game https://archive.ph/9Hnka
95% of the tech middle management/IC layers lack the ambition and conviction, and technological taste/depth to aspire to the executive suite and get there, or becoming technical founders of startups. US is gifted and cursed with a huge middle management class (one in five instead of one in twenty). While they are wonderful people—in their own way the best people, though we can say that of every human stratum - elite overproduction can be a serious issue. https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1408502050984370177https://graymirror.substack.com/p/5-the-land-its-people-and-their-dogs?s=r
Stop criticizing or holding accountable large abstract classes of people. And stop trying to make an “example” of members of the class, no matter how egregious. Instead pick on 5 named people who are structurally special. https://archive.ph/hkQuk
To persuade smart people, you have to start from a posture of genuine doubt that matches theirs and work both of you into belief together. If impedance-mismatched persuasion works, one of you is an idiot. If you’re confident you can tell or have no idea, it’s you. The surest sign that you’re probably not the idiot is the sneaking suspicion that you might be. https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1302083532022362112
You shouldn’t say something explicitly and directly cruel to someone unless you would be okay with those words ruining their life. Teasing is okay and absolutely ripping into the rare entitled individual is okay, but mid-level cruelty is rarely good. https://philosophybear.substack.com/p/twitter-or-at-least-a-portion-thereof?s=r
Law of human labor supply: we either sell enough time to make rent, or work because we’re bored of leisure, or sell minimum fraction of soul we can to make fuck-you money https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1231736422089887749
Any gains you make with critical or lateral thinking is paid for by blindspot growth somewhere else. People who advocate critical thinking also like to remind you that correlation is not causation. https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1317674734717317120
The great conceit of late neoliberalism past invention of PowerPoint was that solving for a better future was a matter of more and better presentations about it. https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1440470983094140938
Having had zero bouts of depression by age 25 is probably a worse mental illness than having had 1-2 mild/moderate ones. Makes you kind of an idiot on the EQ axis. And the older you get without having encountered depression, the costlier the resulting EQ deficit will be. Classic sign of undepression: you can’t tell when someone has kinda given up on a task that requires non-depressed attention, and you push them harder and harder getting more and more frustrated at their “giving up” until you destroy the relationship. https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1253447625770037248
Biases can only be unlearned through overriding past personal experiences with new, contrary experiences equal in strength. Attempting to artificially manipulate bias can only really shift it from side to side, without changing any of the core preferences and assumptions leading to it. https://theunlikelyno.com/2019/01/18/in-praise-of-bias
Over-emphasis on the normative, the cult of individualism, and the actual or perceived impotence of the modern person when confronting personal, community or societal issues are, alone, bad news. Together? They are utterly toxic. https://swellandcut.com/2018/11/25/the-toxic-triangle-of-modernity
Request for coinage:
1. "Curse of Development" from Gervais, The depth of any transaction is limited by the depth of the shallower party. If the situational developmental gap between two people is sufficiently small, the more evolved person will systematically lose. https://dustingetz.com/d4337a942961484b8b408d4b1963e161
2. "Elite Overproduction" by Turchin, or a reiteration of Tonybee, could likely be tied to Putt, Shirky, and Gervais. https://peterturchin.com/age-of-discord/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Societal_collapse#Toynbee%E2%80%99s_theory_of_decay
3. Ringelmann Effect: Individual members of a group become less and less productive as the size of the group increases. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringelmann_effect
4. Dunbar's Circles (related to Ringelmann Effect) Effective Decision-Marking Group Size is 5. Task Team size averages about 15. Effective Team Size averages around 50. Maximum Social Network Size is 150. https://sheilamargolis.com/2011/01/what-is-the-optimal-group-size-for-decision-making/ http://www.theagileelephant.com/dunbars-numbers-and-organising-for-social-business/ http://www.lifewithalacrity.com/2004/03/the_dunbar_numb.html https://kissflow.com/digital-workplace/collaboration/dunbars-number/
5. Sowell's First Law: Politics disregard economics and scarcity. https://rclutz.com/2019/08/05/economics-1-law-vs-politics-1-law/
6. "Patron-Client Relationship" contra "Law of Reciprocity".
Zymurgy's Law of Evolving Systems Dynamics: "Once you open up a can of worms, the only way to get it back in is to use a bigger can."
Brown's corallary - It is true that on the internet no-one can tell if you're a dog, but it is also true that everyone can tell if you're a jerk.
Also holy crap others are having ideas too (must read BTW, currently curating individual items):
https://themagnet.substack.com/p/the-magnet-0013-a-list-of-eponymous?s=r
https://www.swyx.io/writing/eponymous-laws/
https://commonplacefacts.com/2018/10/25/go-to-law-school-over-these-eponymous-laws-part-i/
https://commonplacefacts.com/2018/11/05/go-to-law-school-over-these-eponymous-laws-part-2/
https://uxdesign.cc/the-designers-handbook-of-eponymous-laws-part-1-business-strategy-12b629a5e87f
https://uxdesign.cc/the-designers-handbook-of-eponymous-laws-part-2-human-behavior-736a4a7c295a
https://uxdesign.cc/the-designers-handbook-of-eponymous-laws-part-3-management-5c5bf03badf7
https://www.nimmonsconsulting.com/smart-thinking/useful-eponymous-laws/
To whoever wrote Ashby's Law "Variety absorbs variety", you ruined my Monday. https://archive.fo/R0llR https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variety_(cybernetics) http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2016/09/29/soft-bias-of-underspecified-goals/ http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2014/02/07/an-information-age-glossary/
Hawking Heuristic: "Every formula halves viewership" (Peter Turchin would groan at this), see https://www.npr.org/2019/07/08/738916420/hawking-profiles-the-ever-fascinating-scientist-minus-the-nefarious-equations and https://bookmarks.reviews/turtles-all-the-way-down-stephen-hawkings-a-brief-history-of-time/ and https://archive.fo/Fu724 and https://archive.fo/RpB2G
Some more Laws I can find, in regards to collaborataive and reporting preference.
Tuchman's Law: The fact of being reported multiplies the apparent extent of any deplorable development by five to tenfold https://jercher.wordpress.com/2010/08/11/tuchmans-law/ and https://rleighturner.com/tuchmans-law-or-always-look-on-the-bright-side-910/
Zeigler's Law: If a politician says that government is a problem, what he means is that if you elect him, government will be a problem https://twitter.com/projct/status/1285609893307863043
Bartz's Law of Hokey Horsepuckery: The more ridiculous a belief system, the higher the probability of its success.
Laws of infernal Dynamics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_of_infernal_dynamics
Thoreau's Law "If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life" (for some reason nobody properly coined this?)
Machiavelli’s Rules http://ianchadwick.com/machiavelli/addenda/machiavellis-rules/
With all sincerity, here is another one from Church's extended works.
Church's Fundamental Theorem of Employment: A person is hired to do work that the hiring person (a) cannot do for himself, or (b) does not want to do. P.S. It is extremely important to know which of the two is the case. https://archive.fo/RSM0Z
Acton's Law: Judge talent at its best and character at its worst. https://archive.fo/WARUD
Mike Test: Healthy workplace culture is defined by willingness to hire superior men even if credit is not given for such acts. archive: https://archive.fo/lbxji
...and then there's Cole's Law, finely shredded raw cabbage with a vinegar or mayonaisse dressing.
Sorry. I couldn't help myself.
Request for coinage: The writerly bias, or "Only important intellectuals and artists write or create works on the human condition that are well remembered, but most people are neither important artists or intellectuals, thus we should expect cultural understandings of the human condition to be jaundiced with the perspective of artists and intellectuals." https://philosophybear.substack.com/p/just-three-dumb-guy-thoughts-i-had
Eponymous spaghetti is pretty bad (an anti-example):
Muccigrosso’s Razor: “Never attribute to malice or stupidity that which can adequately be explained by well-intentioned ignorance that has been cultivated through motivated reasoning in service of selfish comfort.” https://davesdailydiscourse.substack.com/p/daves-daily-dose-christmas-eve-eve-10a?s=r
More coinages to unload unto this comment section (may Bacon have mercy on my bad works)
Paul Anderson's Law of Least Usefulness: Any hierarchy tends to become corrupt and incompetent as quickly as possible. (so do non-hierarchical systems), as long as there is competitive promotion. https://paradox-point.blogspot.com/2011/10/speedy-peter-principle.html (see also https://paradox-point.blogspot.com/2012/03/on-stellar-metaphor.html)
Orwellian victory: a victory that ensures a bigger and better war. It is identical to actual victory only if war is peace. Orwellian defeat: a voluntary defeat that ensures a peace on terms advantageous to the apparently defeated. See https://paradox-point.blogspot.com/2012/03/on-orwellian-victory.html and https://paradox-point.blogspot.com/2012/03/paradox-of-prophesy.html
If you diss the Man, then do not trust the Man. Plan your parry to their counter-attack before they know you exist. You can't rebel alone. Seek rich friends, powerful allies and independent sanctuaries. There is no such thing as a free lunch, a fair fight or an unmixed motive. https://paradox-point.blogspot.com/2013/07/three-whistleblowers.html
If you discover something new, there's a significant chance you'll be accused of some form of heresy. http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html and http://www.paulgraham.com/nov.html
Good procrastination is avoiding errands to do real work. http://www.paulgraham.com/procrastination.html
Aaronson's Law of Complexodynamics: https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=762 https://medium.com/swlh/what-is-entropy-an-exploration-of-life-time-and-immortality-85488e1eea36 and http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspa.2019.0777
The drivers of organisational scope are therefore the capacity of the institution to manage the complicated, set against the complexity of the cause-and-effect relations to which it is having to respond. https://www.lacanticles.com/2011/12/07/the-drivers-of-organisational-scope/
If all of our social feeds started to be automated by AI tomorrow, we'd lose all interest in being here. We're here for the people. We're here for the mimesis. https://read.lukeburgis.com/p/our-mimetic-culture?s=r https://read.lukeburgis.com/p/the-desire-chamber?s=r
Contrary to popular belief, many people come away from group deliberation —including ”dialogue with people from the other side"—more polarized and extreme than they went in. https://read.lukeburgis.com/p/the-law-of-group-polarization?s=r
Warining: angsty. Sam Hyde noted girls will not complete men, while men with Asperger’s will. For the opposite sex it is bipolar women. https://eggreport.substack.com/p/the-woman-question-3-girls-interface?s=r
The internet is not for caring, it’s for people who wished they cared. https://eggreport.substack.com/p/quick-thought-on-victimhood-culture?s=r
The myth is that lowering barriers of access to producing, universalising access to production, depresses wages and devalues the product. When you remove all barriers of access to something, the general quality nosedives. It’s presented as universal access, freedom, the American dream - everyone can become pewdiepie if they just pick themselves up by the bootstraps. https://eggreport.substack.com/p/the-attention-economy-1-devaluation?s=r
The “culture war” is not about winning the arguments, it’s about deciding the terms of engagement, deciding which words you use to have the argument. https://eggreport.substack.com/p/meta-history-and-culture-war-language?s=r
Trilemmas barrage in http://paradox-point.blogspot.com/2013/05/on-troikas-7-trilemmas.html http://paradox-point.blogspot.com/2013/05/on-troikas-9-republican-troikas.html http://paradox-point.blogspot.com/2013/05/on-troikas-10-kantian-troikas.html https://paradox-point.blogspot.com/2013/06/carrollian-trilemmas.html https://paradox-point.blogspot.com/2013/06/on-troikas-finite-boundless-lines.html
Quote barrage: https://paradox-point.blogspot.com/2014/01/as-inspirational-as-1984.html
Some nerd theories http://www.paulgraham.com/fn.html http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html http://www.paulgraham.com/renerds.html
Request for coinage (or heresy marking):
The Lizardman (contrarian) constant is 4% across multiple forms of skepticism, and it is better to have it that way than to have groupthink. https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/Lizardmans-Constant-Is-4-Percent https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspa.2015.0748
Outgroup = Proxemics + Small Differences https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/I-Can-Tolerate-Anything-Except-The-Outgroup
Every cause wants to be a tribe/cult https://www.greaterwrong.com/lw/lv/every_cause_wants_to_be_a_cult/ https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/The-Ideology-Is-Not-The-Movement
Being at the bottom of a hierarchy is stressful, and this is true, but only within an impedance matched band of 1-point on a log scale. But at a log band of 2 or higher, it’s not stressful, just plain confusing and clumsy protocol wise. Three solutions emerge: patronage, gentry theater, highlighting inequality. https://archive.ph/eOjAX
It’s well known in management theory that a connection between leader and follower cannot form if the IQ difference between them is more than about 20 points https://graymirror.substack.com/p/there-is-no-ai-risk
A rule of thumb in the teaching profession states that to be an effective teacher at a given level, you need to have studied 5 years beyond that level. This has nothing to do with subject-matter expertise, and everything to do with trying to exit the Curse of Development zone. https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/04/14/the-gervais-principle-iii-the-curse-of-development/
The sociopath move of course is to mediocritize yourself the hell away from this whole thing, but the number of places you can hide out profitably while this stuff blows over is shrinking. And directly profiteering of the culture wars goes beyond sociopathy to masochism. https://archive.ph/p5eqU https://archive.fo/1uy2f
You learn the negative sum game, striving hard to make it to zero-sum at least. Enlightened temporary exit to go find a kobayashi maru cheat code. Return to break through to positive-sum game https://archive.ph/9Hnka
95% of the tech middle management/IC layers lack the ambition and conviction, and technological taste/depth to aspire to the executive suite and get there, or becoming technical founders of startups. US is gifted and cursed with a huge middle management class (one in five instead of one in twenty). While they are wonderful people—in their own way the best people, though we can say that of every human stratum - elite overproduction can be a serious issue. https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1408502050984370177 https://graymirror.substack.com/p/5-the-land-its-people-and-their-dogs?s=r
It is much better for professionals to directly command corporate management about employee assistance, than to waste everyone's time. https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/Bullshit-Jobs-Part-1-Of-Infinity
Any complex multi-person system, the system acts according to its own chaotic incentives that don’t always corresponds to anyone within it. Rage on social media is negative-sum by nature. https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/Meditations-On-Moloch https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/The-Toxoplasma-Of-Rage
Taboos create celebrities who avoid repercussions expected by citizens. Censorship = support / consensus. https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/The-Virtue-Of-Silence https://www.slatestarcodexabridged.com/Can-Things-Be-Both-Popular-And-Silenced https://archive.ph/1uy2f
Stop criticizing or holding accountable large abstract classes of people. And stop trying to make an “example” of members of the class, no matter how egregious. Instead pick on 5 named people who are structurally special. https://archive.ph/hkQuk
To persuade smart people, you have to start from a posture of genuine doubt that matches theirs and work both of you into belief together. If impedance-mismatched persuasion works, one of you is an idiot. If you’re confident you can tell or have no idea, it’s you. The surest sign that you’re probably not the idiot is the sneaking suspicion that you might be. https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1302083532022362112
Concealment probably has negative utility for minor and massive ambitions since it is costly (see also barbell strategy) https://swellandcut.com/2018/09/26/in-plain-sight/
Data is anecdotes plus filters and aggreagators. https://desystemize.substack.com/p/desystemize-8/comment/5802221?s=r
You shouldn’t say something explicitly and directly cruel to someone unless you would be okay with those words ruining their life. Teasing is okay and absolutely ripping into the rare entitled individual is okay, but mid-level cruelty is rarely good. https://philosophybear.substack.com/p/twitter-or-at-least-a-portion-thereof?s=r
If your side is "good at memes", it means that you hold minimal social power. https://zerohplovecraft.substack.com/p/the-good-race
Request for more coinage still (but starting to notice that many of these are interlinked ad nauseum):
Peter Principle for Public Life: Everybody ascends to their level of puffery and eventually suffers puncture. https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1504169308838002690
If you put it together, you reach a megatrend conclusion: if you do not build a second brain or go offline, you will BECOME the second brain https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1125119720590462976
If you don’t switch to hard mode by 35, life switches to impossible mode for you by 45. https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1484953194367127553
Law of human labor supply: we either sell enough time to make rent, or work because we’re bored of leisure, or sell minimum fraction of soul we can to make fuck-you money https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1231736422089887749
Any gains you make with critical or lateral thinking is paid for by blindspot growth somewhere else. People who advocate critical thinking also like to remind you that correlation is not causation. https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1317674734717317120
Snowflakiness arise from compromising on artistic impulses by alloying them with commercial ones. The higher up Maslow’s hierarchy you go the more indistinguishable from others you get. You will slack off at life in proportion to how replaceable or interchangeable you feel. https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1420263871286112264 https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1390356476284215300
The great conceit of late neoliberalism past invention of PowerPoint was that solving for a better future was a matter of more and better presentations about it. https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1440470983094140938
Having had zero bouts of depression by age 25 is probably a worse mental illness than having had 1-2 mild/moderate ones. Makes you kind of an idiot on the EQ axis. And the older you get without having encountered depression, the costlier the resulting EQ deficit will be. Classic sign of undepression: you can’t tell when someone has kinda given up on a task that requires non-depressed attention, and you push them harder and harder getting more and more frustrated at their “giving up” until you destroy the relationship. https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1253447625770037248
Biases can only be unlearned through overriding past personal experiences with new, contrary experiences equal in strength. Attempting to artificially manipulate bias can only really shift it from side to side, without changing any of the core preferences and assumptions leading to it. https://theunlikelyno.com/2019/01/18/in-praise-of-bias
Companies will contract a consulting firm when they need to cover their assess internally or promote a customer trend. https://theunlikelyno.com/2018/02/18/my-experience-in-business-consulting-a-synopsis
If you want to end it without hurting the other person, make yourself gradually busier and less accessible to the person. https://theunlikelyno.com/2018/03/04/break-ups-of-the-second-kind
Survivorship bias doesn’t account for ergodicity (regression toward the mean). https://kadavy.net/blog/posts/survivorship-bias
Tools help exercise thoughts, or record them. They rarely do both. https://kadavy.net/blog/posts/grippy-slippy-tools
It is better to build in enlightenment than to daydream in darkness. https://kadavy.net/blog/posts/shipping-is-a-skill https://kadavy.net/blog/posts/finishers-paradox
In most cases, A/B testing is useless, and A/A testing can be valid. https://kadavy.net/blog/posts/aa-testing
If you’re trying to be efficient, clock-time is the way to go. But if you’re trying to be effective, event-time is the way to go. https://kadavy.net/blog/posts/clock-time-event-time/ https://kadavy.net/blog/posts/time-worship
True north in software is often the direction that combines ambiguity and evidence of fertility in the most alluring way: the direction of maximal interestingness. https://breakingsmart.com/en/season-1/rough-consensus-and-maximal-interestingness
If I can predict what you’ll do or say, I’ll lose interest in you rapidly. If you can keep regularly surprising me in some way, forcing me to actually think in unscripted ways in order to respond, I’ll stay interested. https://swellandcut.com/2017/03/16/deep-work-derp-work-and-the-diversity-of-inputs
Character is revealed in the tails of existence. https://swellandcut.com/2018/03/11/character-is-revealed-in-the-tails
Mastery = Time x Attention x Ego x Love https://swellandcut.com/2016/05/02/a-cog-in-someone-elses-machine
Until expertise in the boring edge is needed and until the functionality of the bleeding edge is realised, both are undervalued, but when those times inevitably come a premium can be had. https://swellandcut.com/2020/09/05/fat-tails-and-boring-edges https://swellandcut.com/2017/08/29/barbells-birth-and-maturation/ https://swellandcut.com/2018/07/17/the-illegible-space/ https://swellandcut.com/2018/09/26/in-plain-sight/ https://swellandcut.com/2018/06/28/the-trident/
Over-emphasis on the normative, the cult of individualism, and the actual or perceived impotence of the modern person when confronting personal, community or societal issues are, alone, bad news. Together? They are utterly toxic. https://swellandcut.com/2018/11/25/the-toxic-triangle-of-modernity
Sometimes you are the hardest person to fool, especially when it comes to the imposition of necessity. https://swellandcut.com/2018/06/15/the-hardest-person-to-fool
Most people, when given a little bit of freedom and choice, banish variety from their lives. https://swellandcut.com/2016/01/05/the-opposite-of-variety/
Time to return to news clipping, gurus are too addicting to ignore (orz).
Faust's Law of Development Curse: "Your development is arrested by your strengths, not your weaknesses. Arrested-development behavior is caused by a strength-based addiction." (Thank you MLP, it is cringe but true) https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-the-gervais-principle/comment/6546758