This entry starts a new series about amusing philosophical, anthropological, sociological and other principles. Althouh many of them seem nothing but witticisms at first, the criterion for this series is that the “law” is empirically valid and has some degree of serious value. The numerous corollaries and “laws” inspired by the Murphy's law have failed to get the spotlight here.
Poe's law is an adage named after its author Nathan Poe:
Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is impossible to create a parody of fundamentalism that someone won't mistake for the real thing. In other words, hardcore extremism is indistinguishable from a well-made parody because a parody is crated by taking something to the extreme. If you're sceptical, read
ChristWire.
Conway's law, stated by computer programmer Melvin Conway, says:
…organizations which design systems … are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations. Although it seems humorous at first, this is a valid sociological observation with abundant examples. The initial version of the adage was:
If you have four groups working on a compiler, you'll get a four-pass compiler.The
Peter Principle was introduced by the eponymous book by Laurence Peter and Raymond Hull:
In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence. A system which rewards competent employees by promoting them will keep raising an employee until they are no longer competent, which is their level of incompetence. However, many real hierarchical systems can function because not all their employees have reached their incompetence levels yet, and those who haven't are the ones doing actual work. An exaggerated version of this principle found in Scott Adams' “Dilbert” comics
states that the least competent employees get promoted to middle management to minimize the harm from their activity. This “Dilbert principle” has been subsequently described in detail in the eponymous satirical book by Adams which is recommended reading at some courses in management.
Schneier's law, attributed to the cryptographer Bruce Schneier, was stated in a speech by Cory Doctorow as follows:
Any person can invent a security system so clever that he or she can't imagine a way of breaking it. A similar principle was earlier formulated by David Kahn in his book “The Codebreakers”:
Few false ideas have more firmly gripped the minds of so many intelligent men than the one that, if they just tried, they could invent a cipher that no one could break. A recent example: Bangladesh extremists were
using a cipher of their own invention based on Excel transposition tables. The idea of this cipher is known since ancient history as the Caesar cipher, and to break it is considered the most trivial exercise in cryptanalysis. Modern ciphers such as AES were rejected by the extremists because they are known to the infidels, which in their opinion lowers the security.
A decent conclusion to this issue will be
Stigler's law which says:
No scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer. Because similar discoveries are often made independently by different people, and an idea is usually associated not with the one who was first but rather with the one who drew attention to it, examples of Stigler's law are surprisingly abundant. Stephen Stigler who published “Stigler's law of eponymy”, attributes its discovery to the sociologist Robert Merton, making Stigler's law an example of itself.
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