2004 : WHAT'S YOUR LAW?

Sterling's Law of Ubiquitous Computation

First, your home is a constant, while the Net is a place you go; then the Net becomes a constant while your home is a place you go.

Sterling's Corollary to Clarke's Law

Any sufficiently advanced garbage is indistinguishable from magic.

O'Donnell's Law of Academic Administration

If it feels good, don't do it.

Because if it feels good, it's going to be because it eases some frustration you're feeling from all the constraints and hassles of the institution; or because it really shows up so-and-so; or because it makes you feel you really do have a little authority around here after all. It won't, it won't, and you don't. Better to calm down, make sure you know all the facts, make sure you've talked to all 49 stakeholders, and sleep on it, then do the thing you have to hold your nose to do.

O'Donnell's Law of History

There are no true stories.

Story-tellers are in the iron grip of readers' expectations. Stories have beginnings, middles, ends, heroes, villains, clarity, resolution. Life has none of those things, so any story gets to be a story (especially if it's a good story) by edging away from what really happened (which we don't know in anywhere near enough detail anyway) towards what makes a good story. Historians exist to wrestle with the story temptation the way Laocoon wrestled with the snakes. But at the end of the day, to tell anybody anything, you'll probably tell a story, so then be sure to follow:

Luther's Law

Pecca fortiter.

Literally, "Sin bravely." His idea was that you're going to make a mess of things anyway, so you might as well do so boldly, confidently, with a little energy and imagination, rather than timidly, fearfully, half-heartedly.

Time Does Not Exist

Contrary to what generally assumed, the physical world does not exist "in time". At the basic microscopic level, the world is better described in terms of a a-temporal theory, where physical laws do not express time evolution of physical variables, but just relations between variables. Time emerges only thermodynamically when describing macroscopic variables. Therefore time is only a side effect of our ignorance of the microscopic state of the world. "Time is a side effect of ignorance."

Space Does Not Exist

The physical world does not exist "in space". The physical world is made by an ensemble of particles and fields, which do not live in an external space, but rather live "on each other", and which can be in a relation of contiguity with respect to one another. "Space" is the order implied by this relation. These two principles are implied by what we have learned about the physical world with general relativity and with quantum mechanics. The second principle is largely a return to the Pre-Newtonian relational understanding of space, while the first has few antecendents in our culture.

Sabbagh's First Law

Never assume.

All the mistakes I have made in my life—not that there are that many, of course—have been because I failed to follow my own law.

Sabbagh's Second Law

The biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has occurred. I think this is the more original and far-reaching of the two laws but I have put it second because it's not really mine. It was said to me by Alan Mulally, an inspiring Boeing manager (and they need inspiring managers at
the moment.)

A religion will increase in social value until a majority of its members actually believe in it—at which point the social damage it causes will increase exponentially as long as it is in existence.

Rushkoff's Law of Media

True communication can only occur between people with equal access to the medium in which the communication is taking place.

Because people understand by finding in their memories the closest possible match to what they are hearing and use that match as the basis of comprehension, any new idea will be treated as a variant of something the listener has already thought of or heard. Agreement with a new idea means a listener has already had a similar thought and well appreciates that the speaker has recognized his idea. Disagreement means the opposite. Really new ideas are incomprehensible. The good news is that for some people, failure to comprehend is the beginning of understanding. For most, of course, it is the beginning of dismissal.

Traub's Law (Version 1)

The important things in life often happen by chance while we're agonizing over the trivia.

Traub's Law (Version 2)

The important events of a person's life are the products of chains of highly improbable occurrences.

Happy people are those who do not pass up an opportunity to laugh at themselves or to make love with someone else. Unhappy people are those who get this backwards.

In a context of widespread literacy, easy communications, and a large class of people with ample leisure time, the social movement that begins by addressing a concrete grievance will, after the grievance has been largely addressed, pass into the hands of persons inclined for individual reasons towards the dramatic and self-righteous, who will manipulate the movement's iconography and passion into a staged indignation difficult for outsiders to square with reality, and with little actively progressive or beneficent intention.

For any experience, thought, question, or solution there is a corresponding analog in the biophysical state of the brain.

Lykken's First Law

The quality of one's intellectual productions is a function of the product of talent (e.g., intelligence) times mental energy. Although there are many and varied tests for assessing intelligence, psychologists have not as yet even attempted to construct a measure of individual differences in mental energy.

Lykken's Second Law

The mind consists of genetically-determined hardware and experientially-determined software. The hardware components are not constructed by genes working either individually or additively but, rather, by groups of genes working sequentially and configurally. Each human mating produces at least some gene configurations that are unique, having never occurred previously. This is why, among other things, human genius often occurs uniquely in an otherwise undistinguished family line.

If you are writing history and try to keep it up-to-date up to a time T before the present, it will be out-of-date within a time T after the present.

This law applies also to scientific review articles.

( Thanks for including the Doctor Moreau quote, which describes us very well.

Myers' Law of Truth

The surest truth is that some of our beliefs err.

Monotheism, someone has said, offers two simple axioms: 1) There is a God. 2) It's not you. Knowing that we are fallible humans underlies the humility and openness that inspires science, and democracy. As Madeline L'Engle noted, "The naked intellect is an extraordinarily inaccurate instrument."

Myers' Law of Self-Perception

Most people see themselves as better than average.

Nine in ten managers rate themselves as superior to their average peer. Nine in ten college professors rated themselves as superior to their average colleague. And six in ten high school seniors rate their "ability to get along with others" as in the top 10 percent. Most drivers–even most drivers who have been hospitalized after accidents–believe themselves more skilled than the average driver. "The one thing that unites all human beings, regardless of age, gender, religion, economic status or ethnic background," observes Dave Barry, "is that deep down inside, we all believe that we are above average drivers." Excess humility is an uncommon flaw.

Myers Law of Writing

Anything that can be misunderstood will be.

Communication media that enable collective action on new scales, at new rates, among new groups of people, multiply the power available to civilizations and enable new forms of social interaction. The alphabet enabled empire and monotheism, the printing press enabled science and revolution, the telephone enabled bureaucracy and globalization, the Internet enabled virtual communities and electronic markets, the mobile telephone enabled smart mobs and tribes of urban info-nomads.

Siler's First Law

The brain is what the brain creates. Its workings reflect the workings of everything it creates.

Siler's Second Law

Genius is everywhere, everyday, in everyone, in every way imaginable.

Arthur's First Law

Nothing is evenly spread; everything happens in clumps. The universe has clumps—galaxies, star systems, stars, planets, asteroids. You meet an old friend for the first time in years, then again and again. The smart folk are all together. It's a universal.

Arthur's Second Law

More data is good, and drives out the bad.

More is different.

A linear projection into the future of any science or technology is like a form of propaganda — often persuasive, almost always wrong.

Hut's First Law

Any attempt to define what is science is doomed to failure

Scientists often attack what they consider irrational creeds by first defining what counts as science and then showing that those creeds don't fit within the limits specified. While their motive is often right, their approach is totally wrong. Science has no method. It is opportunistic in the extreme, with theory adapting with admirable agility to the most amazing experimental discoveries, no matter what previous 'corner stones' have to be given up: quantum mechanics is the most striking example. This opportunism is the only reason that science has remained alive and well, notwithstanding the human tendency for stagnation that is exemplified so clearly through more than a dozen successive generations of individual scientists.

Hut's Second Law

In scientific software development, research = education

When writing a large software package or a whole software environment, the most efficient way to produce a robust product is to write documentation simultaneously with the computer codes, on all levels: from comment lines to manual pages to narrative that explains the reasons for the many choices made. Having to explain to yourselves and your coworkers how you choose what why when is the best guide to quickly discovering hidden flaws and better alternatives, minimizing the need to
backtrack later. Therefore, the most efficient way to write a large coherent body of software as a research project is to view it as an educational project.

I have come across similar endorsements of documentation in various places, including Donald Knuth's idea of literate programming, and Gerald Sussman's advice to write with utmost clarity for humans first, and for computers as an afterthought.

Provine's Motor Precocity Principle

Organisms spond before they respond (act before they react).

This principle of neurobehavioral development and evolution describes the tendency of the nervous system to produce motor output before it receives sensory input. Because motor systems often evolve and develop before sensory systems, sensory input cannot have the dominant influence on neural structure and function predicted by some psychological and neurological theories.

The evolutionary precocity of motor relative to sensory systems also argues against the classical reflex as a primal step in neurobehavioral evolution. Spontaneously active motor processes are adaptive and can emerge through natural selection unlike sensory processes that are not adaptive without a behavior to guide. Sensory systems evolved to control already existing movement.

Another argument against the primacy of reflexes is that they require the unlikely simultaneous evolution of a sensory and a motor process. The tendency of organisms to "spond before they respond" requires the re-evaluation of many other traditional neurobehavioral concepts and processes.

Provine's Self/Other Exclusionary Principle

The "self," the most basic sense of personhood, is defined as that which is not "other." "Other," the most primitive level of social entity, is defined as a non-self, animate stimulus on the surface of your skin.

Self is distinguished from other by a neurological cancellation process. These definitions are attractive because they permit a neurologically and computationally based approach to problems that are traditionally mired in personality and social theory. Although our sense of identity involves more than self/non-self discrimination, such a mechanism may be at its foundation and a first step toward the evolution of personhood and the neurological computation of its boundaries. For a demonstration of this mechanism, consider your inability to tickle yourself. Tickle requires stimulation by a non-self animate entity on the surface of your skin. Similar, self-produced stimulation is cancelled and is not ticklish.

Without such a self/non-self discriminator, we would be constantly be tickling ourselves by accident, and the world would be filled with goosey people lurching their way through life in a chain reaction filled with tactile false alarms. Developing a similar machine algorithm may lead to "ticklish" robots whose performance is enhanced by their capacity to distinguish touching from being touched, and, provocatively, a computationally based construct of machine personhood.

Maddox's First Law

Those who scorn the "publish or perish" principle are the most eager to see their own manuscripts published quickly and given wide publicity—and the least willing to see their length reduced.

Maddox's Second Law

Reviewers who are best placed to understand an author's work are the least likely to draw attention to its achievements, but are prolific sources of minor criticism, especially the identification of typos.

Maddox's Third Law

Just as nature is supposed to abhor a vacuum, so scientific opinion abhors questions unlikely to be answered soon, whence the general belief that the origin of the Universe is now nearly understood.

Epstein's First Law

Know when you are winning.

Epstein's Second Law

The key question is not what can I gain but what do I have to lose.

Kosslyn's First Law

Body and mind are not as separate as they appear to be. Not only does the state of the body affect the mind, but vice-versa.

Kosslyn's Second Law

The individual and the group are not as separate as they appear to be. A part of each mind spills over into the minds of other people, who help us think and regulate our emotions.

Many well defined manifolds lack unifying centers that define or control them.

• Just because some things are genuinely sacred does not mean that there is a god.

• Just because a corporation or a country seems to be hierarchically structured does not mean that any single leader is really in charge.

• Just because some behavior is conscious and intentional does not entail a "ghost in the machine," a homunculus, or a central intender.

• Just because evolution appears to be directional, from less order and complexity toward greater order and complexity, that does not presuppose either an alpha-designer or an omega-telos.

Precursors to Ogilvy's Law:

1. Derridean Deconstruction, which is not about taking things apart, but showing how they were never all that unified in the first place

2. Wittgenstein's replacement of Platonic Ideas‹e.g., that one thing which all instances of 'game' or 'justice' have in common‹with the much looser notion of "family resemblances"

Lemma to Ogilvy's Law:

Demythologizing false unities does not degrade the values to be found in their respective manifolds.

• Nietzsche's announcement of the death of god does not mean that nothing is sacred.

• Skepticism regarding conspiracy theories does not entail naiveté regarding power or the impossibility of effective leadership.

• Seeing through Cartesianism in the cognitive sciences does not entail eliminative materialism, a lack of intentionality, or the reduction of mind to matter.

• Dismissing teleology does not deny a manifest directionality to evolution.
In each of these cases and many others like them, the deconstructive turn should not be confused with nihilism or deflationary debunking. The value of Ogilvy's Law lies in its ability to help predict which valleys harbor real value, and which peaks are better left undefended

Atran's Power Law of History

(a corollary to the law of unintended consequences)

The major events that determine human history follow a power distribution (a more or less straight line on a log-log scale), with catastrophic and cascading consequences (economic and health crises, political and cultural revolutions, war and terrorism, etc.), because people naturally prefer to act upon the future based on their modeling of past occurrences. People do not repeat the catastrophes of history because they forget it; people build up self-destructing ideologies and behavior patterns that continue history's catastrophic path because they remember the past too well (e.g., "the maginot effect" for war and the soon-to-be "box-cutting effect" for terrorism).

Ancillary: For politics, history's most well-developed and self-assured "isms" (e.g., colonialism, fascism, communism, globalism) are those most prone to radical collapse.

Atran's Law of Bare Counterintuition

(for the cultural survival of absurd ideas)

Natural selection endowed humans with an intuitive ontology that includes folkbiology (e.g., biodiversity divides into mutually exclusive groups of beings, and each group has a proprietary essence), folkpsychology (e.g., intentional and emotional beings have bodies, and have knowledge of other like beings by observing and inferring how other bodies act), and folkphysics (e.g., two bodies cannot simultaneously occupy the same place at the same time, and no body can occupy different places at the same time). Barely counterintuitive ideas, which violate universal constraints on intuitive ontology (e.g., a bodiless being) but otherwise retain most commonsense properties associated with intuitive ontology (a bodiless being who mostly acts and thinks like a person), are those fictions most apt to survive within a culture, most likely to recur in different cultures, and most disposed to cultural variation and elaboration (e.g., sphinxes and griffins, spirits and crystal balls, ghosts and gods).

Ancillary: For religion (i.e., for most humans in all human societies), the more costly one's commitment to some factually absurd but barely counterintuitive world (e.g., afterlife), the more others believe that person to be sincere and trustworthy.

Do ask; don't lie.

(Rationale:) How can we find the happy medium between disclosure and prying, between transparency and overexposure? The last thing we want is a law saying that everyone should disclose everything: vested interests, negotiating strategies, intentions, bank account, marital status, whatever.

How can we instead devise some rule that fits the best qualities of the Net decentralized, more or less self-enforcing, flexible.....and responsive to personal choices? The idea is to create a culture thatexpects disclosure, rather than a legal regime that requires it. People can decide how much they want to play, and others can decide whether to play with them.

First of all, it's two-way. It's not for a single person; it's for an interaction. The first person has to ask; the second person, to answer truthfully or refuse openly to answer.

It drives the responsibility for requiring disclosure down to where it belongs - to those most likely to be affected by the disclosure. It decentralizes the requirement and the enforcement to everyone, instead of leaving it in the hands of a few at the top. (If that's an awkward use of "requirement," it's because we don't even have a word for "decentralized command.")

As an individual, you are not commanded to answer; you may want to protect your own privacy or someone else's. But if you do answer, you must do so truthfully.

Then it's up to the people involved to decide whether to engage - in conversation, in a transaction, in whatever kind of interaction they might be contemplating. The magic of Do ask; don't lie is that the parties to any particular interaction can make a specific, local decision about what level of disclosure is appropriate.

Bunnell's First Law of Retrievability

Everything is retrievable.

Bunnell's Second Law of Retrievability

Everything is stored somewhere. The secret to retrieving things is simply finding out where they are stored.

Verena's Law of Sane Reasoning
Hone your Hunches, Jump, then backtrack to blaze a reliable trail to your Conclusion. But avoid reductions; they lead to mere counterfeits of truth.

Verena's Law of Constructive Proof
Every sound argument can and ought to be turned into a construction that embodies and explains its conclusion

Campbell's First Law

Whatever the science, the forces of nature will exploit any loophole in experimental or theoretical design and construction, any ambiguity in measurement and any unchecked or unrecognised assumption to lead a researcher to enticing but false conclusions.

Campbell's Second Law

Scientists are as vigorous in complaining about the incomprehensibility of others' scientific papers as they are lazy in clarifying their own.

Campbell's Third Law

The probability that a Powerpoint presentation will fail is proportional to the technical sophistication of the institution at which you are presenting it. (And by the way, where the failure is total, your talk will be all the better for it.)

Anderson's Law of Causal Instinct

Humans are engineered to seek for laws, whether or not they're actually there.

Anderson's Law of Skepticism

Most proposed laws, including this one, will probably turn out to be vacuous.

Blakemore's First Law

People are never more honest than you think they are.

Blakemore's Second Law

The only form of intelligence that really matters is the capacity to predict.

Shermer's Last Law

Any sufficiently advanced extra-terrestrial intelligence is indistinguishable from God.

Any ETI that we might encounter would not be at our level of culture, science, and technology, nor would they be behind us. How far ahead of us would they be? If they were only a little ahead of us on an evolutionary time scale, they would be light years ahead of us technologically, because cultural evolution is much more rapid than biological evolution. God is typically described by Western religions as omniscient and omnipotent. Since we are far from the mark on these traits, how could we possibly distinguish a God who has them absolutely, from an ETI who has them in relatively (to us) copious amounts? Thus, we would be unable to distinguish between absolute and relative omniscience and omnipotence. But if God were only relatively more knowing and powerful than us, then by definition it would be an ETI! 

Shermer's Three Principles of Provisional Morality and Evolutionary Ethic

1. The ask-first principle: to find out whether an action is right or wrong, ask first. 

2. The happiness principle: it is a higher moral principle to always seek happiness with someone else's happiness in mind, and never seek happiness when it leads to someone else's unhappiness. 

3. The liberty principle: it is a higher moral principle to always seek liberty with someone else's liberty in mind, and never seek liberty when it leads to someone else's loss of liberty. 

0. The Zeroeth principle: do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

(These principles were derived from a scientific analysis of the evolutionary origins of the moral sentiments and the historical development of evolutionary ethics. The Zeroeth Principle, which precedes the three principles, first evolved hundreds of thousands of years ago but was first codified in writing by the world's great religious leaders and has come down to us as the golden rule. The foundation of the Zeroeth Principle, and the three derivative principles is, in evolutionary theory, reciprocal altruism and the process of reciprocity.)

I refer to my "laws" as "Pöppel's Paradox", and "Pöppel's Universal". Actually the names have been invented by others.

Pöppel's Paradox

Not to see, but to see. Some years ago (1973) we described a phenomenon that patients with a certain brain injury show some residual vision although they do not have a conscious representation of their remained visual capacity. They can orient in space, or they can discriminate simple patterns, but they do not know that they can do it. This phenomenon became known as "blindsight". Apparently there is a lot of implicit processing going in our brain that lacks an explicit representation, but which usually is associated with conscious experience. Interestingly, the phenomenon of blindsight not only made a "career" in the neurosciences, but also in philosophy.

Pöppel's Universal

We take life 3 seconds at a time. Human experience and behaviour is characterized by temporal segmentation. Successive segments or "time windows" have a duration of approx. 3 seconds. Examples: Intentional movements are embedded within 3 s (like a handshake); the anticipation of a precise movement like hitting a golf ball does not go beyond 3 s; if we reproduce the duration of a stimulus, we can do so accurately up to 3 s but not beyond; if we look at ambiguous figures (like a vase vs. two faces) or if we listen to ambiguous phoneme sequences (like Cu-Ba-Cu-Ba-.., either hearing Cuba or Bacu) automatically after approx. 3 s the percept switches to the alternative; the working platform of our short term memory lasts only 3 s (being interrupted after 3 s most of the information is gone); spontaneous speech in all languages is temporally segmented, each segment lasting up to 3 s; this temporal segmentation of speech shows up again in poetry, as a verse of a poem is embedded within 3 s (Shakespeare: "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day"); musical motives preferably last 3 s (remember Beethoven's Fifth Symphony); decisions are made within 3 s (like zapping between TV channels); and there are more examples. Thus, the brain provides a temporal stage that last approx. 3 s, which is used in perception, cognition, movement control, memory, speech, or music.

Aunger's Law of Human Evolution

Human life is unique in being the result of three coevolving information inheritance systems: genes, minds and technology.

Aunger's Law of Technological Evolution

As the rate of technological innovation increases, so too does the inertia from ancillary institutions, but not as much.

Davies' First Law

Time does not pass.

Davies' Second Law

Never let observation stand in the way of a good theory.

Buss’s Third Law of Human Mating

For every mating adaptation in one sex, there exists at least one co-evolved adaptation in the other sex designed to manipulate and exploit it.

Buss’s Fourth Law of Human Mating

For every co-evolved exploitative mating adaptation, there exists at least one co-co-evolved defensive adaptation designed to circumvent being manipulated and exploited.

Buss’s Seventh Law of Human Mating

Never reveal your first two laws of mating, lest they be used to manipulate and exploit you.

Lloyd's It From Qubit Law

The universe is a quantum computer: life, sex, the brain, and human society all arise out of the ability of the universe to process information at the level of atoms, photons and elementary particles.

Every problem that is interesting is also soluble.

Corollary #1

Inherently insoluble problems are inherently boring.

Corollary #2

In the long run, the distinction between what is interesting and what is boring is not a matter of subjective taste but an objective fact.

Corollary #3

The problem of why every problem that is interesting is also soluble, is soluble.

Maria's 1st Law

The anthropic principle in cosmology is just a (silly) corollary of the anthropic principle in religion: We are, therefore god is.

Maria's 2nd Law

We are not the source of the laws of nature. Nature is, whether we are or not.

Maria's 3rd Law

A law at the time of its conception is the solution to a problem or the answer to a question; at that time both the solution and the problem, the question and the answer, are ill-posed.

Seife's First Law

A scientific revolution is a complete surprise. Especially to its authors.

Seife's Second Law

Each generation's scientific neologisms adorn the labels of the next generation's quack cures.

Marcus' First Law

Nature and nurture are not in opposition; nature is what makes nurture possible.

Marcus' Second Law

Nothing in evolution is without precedent; even the most wondrous adaptations are modifications of pre-existing systems.

Marcus' Third Law

What's good enough for the body is good enough for the brain. Brains, like any other organ, take their special character from the actions of individual cells that divide, differentiate, migrate, and die, according to genetic programs that are the product of evolution.

Every technology has an instrumental side, what the technology does for us and a subjective side, what the technology does to us, to our ways of seeing the world, including to our ways of thinking about ourselves.

So the Internet both facilitates communication and changes our sense of identity, privacy, and sexual possibility; gene sequencing both gives us new ways of diagnosing and treating disease and new ways of thinking about human nature and human history. On an instrumental level, interactive, "sociable" robotics offers new opportunities for education, childcare, and eldercare; on a subjective level, it offers new challenges to our view of human nature, and to our moral sense of what kinds of creatures are deserving of relationship.

Turkle's Law of Human Vulnerability to An Active Gaze

If a creature, computational or biological, makes eye contact with a person, tracks her gaze, and gestures with interest toward her, that person will experience the creature as sentient, even capable of understanding her inner state.

The human has evolved to anthropomorphize. We are on the brink of creating machines so "sociable" in appearance that they will push our evolutionary buttons to treat them as kindred. Yet they will not have shared our human biological and social experience and will thus not have our means of access to the meanings of moments in the human life cycle: a child's first step, an adolescent's strut, a parent's pride. Yet we will not be in complete control of our feelings for these objects because our feelings will not be based on what they know or understand, but on what we "experience" them as knowing, a very different thing.

We don't know what people and animals are "really" thinking but grant them a "species pass" in which we make assumptions about their inner states. It is a social and moral contract. Contemporary technology has put us close to the moment when we shall be called upon to make this kind of contract (or some other kind) about creatures of our own devising. We are called upon to answer the question: What kinds of relationships are appropriate to have with a machine? Our answer will not only affect the instrumental roles that we allow technology to play but the way technology will co-create the human psyche and sensibility of the future.

Progress requires the Pareto Optimization of Competitiveness and Informativeness

The simple idea that Nature is "Red in Tooth and Claw" lends a religious fervor to those promoting Competition as the right organizing principle for open-ended innovation, e.g. in Laissez Faire Capitalism, government procurement, Social Darwinism, personnel review, and even high-stakes educational testing.

Through the use of mathematical and computer models of learning, we discovered that competition between learning agents does not lead to open-ended progress. Instead, it leads to boom-bust cycles, winner-take-all monopolies, and oligarchic groups who collude to block progress. Unfortunately, cooperation (collaborative learning, altruism) fails as well, leading to weak systems easy to invade or corrupt.

The exciting new "law" is that progress can be sustained among self-interested agents when both competitiveness and informativeness are rewarded. A chess master who wins every game ­ like one who loses every game - provides no information on the strengths and weaknesses of other agents, while an informative agent, like a teacher, contributes opportunity and motivation for further progress. We predict that this law will be found in Nature, and will have ramifications for building new learning organizations.

The Pollack

A measurement of innovation rate.

There is no measure of the rate at which processes like art, evolution, companies, and computer programs innovate.

Consider a black box that takes in energy and produces bit-strings. The complexity of a bit-string is not simply its length, because a long string of all 1's or all 0's is quite simple. Kolmogorov measures complexity by the size of the smallest program listing that can generate a string, and Bennet's Logical Depth also accounts for the cost of running the program. But these fail on the Mandelbrot Set, a very beautiful set of patterns arising from a one-line program listing. What of life itself, the result of a simple non-equilibrium chemical process baking for quite a long time? Different algorithmic processes (including fractals, natural evolution, and the human mind) "create" by operating as a "Platonic Scoop," instantiating "ideals" into physical arrangements or memory states.

So to measure innovation rate (in POLLACKS) we divide the P=Product novelty (assigned by an observer with memory) by the L=program listing size and the C= Cost of runtime/space/energy.

Platonic Density = P / LC

Pollack's Law of Robotics

Start over with Pinball Machines.

Moore's law existed before computers; it is just economics of scale with zero labor. If enough demand can justify capital investment in fully automated factories, then the price of a good approaches the cost of its raw materials, energy dissipated, and (patent/copyright) monopoly tax. Everyone knows Moore's law has lead to ultra-small-cheap integrated circuits. But why don't we have ultra-small-cheap mechanical parts?

Pollack's law of Robotics states that we won't get a Moore's law for electro-mechanical systems until we return to the age of the Pinball Machine, and bootstrap the manufacture of general purpose integrated mechatronics, reducing scale from macro through mesa and MEMS. Leaping to Nano is likely to fail.

Chalupa's First Law

No matter how good or bad things are at any given point in time (in science as in life), remember that "this too shall pass."

This is key for attaining longevity in this business... people who "violate" or are unaware of this rule are doomed to failure. In other words, it is vitally important how one deals with success and failure in doing cutting edge science. Failure is the rule even among the most successful working scientists (since 90% of grant application are typically rejected and the top journals reject even a higher percentage); and with respect to success, in all but a few exceptional cases, institutional memory is exceedingly fleeting (i.e., yesterday's superstars are unrecognized by today's grad students, postdocs, junior faculty). So you've got to keep pitching if you want to stay in the science game.

Chalupa's Second Law

Don't underestimate the importance of fashion in doing science.

Another key for success in science...if you're too far ahead of the herd (with very few exception) you're not going to get funded by NIH/NSF or published in the premier journals. This is in spite of the fact that they claim that they fund innovative research. Anyone who has spend as much time on grant review committees as I have will recognize the power of this rule. In other words, there is a price to pay for originality and every working scientist knows this is the case.

Drexler's First Law

Physical technology evolves toward limits set by physical law.

Drexler's Second Law

A technology approaching the limits set by physical law must build with atomic precision.

Laumann's First Proposition

Moderation in levels of partnered sex activity is the mode for the bulk of humankind and is consistent with high levels of subjective well-being.

Laumann's Second Proposition

Low levels of subjective sexual well-being is associated with poor physical, emotional, and mental health.

These propositions (they are empirical associations and not established as causal) are based on my extensive international work on human sexuality. They are based on surveys I have conducted in the United States and China as well as the Pfizer-funded Global Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Behavior (N = 27,500) which interviewed equal numbers of men and women 40 to 80 years old in 29 countries world wide. The real question is the nature of the causal link between these variables. 

Amato's First Law of Awe

Awe begins in the eye of the beholder.

Limited as it is, biology's homegrown sensory physiology is sufficient in our case to ignite wonder and curiosity about just where it is we find ourselves thrown, how we got there, and how we can even know anything at all. Therein lies the beginning of science.

Amato's Second Law of Awe

Transcending our own sensory limitations with technological tools of observation, a relentless theme of the history of science, enhances the experience of awe itself because it expands the variety of attributes of the universe that we can know about. Therein lies one of the most underrated values of science.

(For example, we used to see the world in only a rainbow of colors. Our tools have shown us that the rainbow is a mere sliver of electromagnetic wavelengths sandwiched between an infinitude of previously invisible ones.)

I think....
there....
4a.m.

Kai's Exactness Dilemma

93.8127 % of all statistics are useless.

Kai's Example Dilemma

A good analogy is like a diagonal frog.

Once the mind is freed to think positionally without orientation, a logic of relationships naturally ensues.

I am having difficulty formulating a law to give you. Through the millennia, even the most brilliant minds rarely generated great and profound "laws." Probably every "law" ever made had been broken or will crumble after a time. Perhaps Edge is asking the wrong question. Knowledge moves in an ever-expanding, upward-pointing funnel. From the rim, we look down and see previous knowledge from a new perspective as new theories are formed. Today's conjectures mutate, new theories evolve, and yesterday's impossibilities become part of everyday life.

Be wary of scientific dualisms.

Approach them with caution, the way demolition experts regard bombs, likely to explode, in this case into unproductive argument and the obscuring of truth. "Opposing forces" are the scientific version of the original dualism—good vs evil and darkness vs. light. Instead, of acting in opposition, in nature two forces are likely to dependent, interactive and interwoven; sometimes they are merely two names for the same thing. 

For example:

Brain vs Mind
Mind vs Body
Emotion vs Reason
Nature vs Nurture
Us vs Them

Seek unity.

Remember always that it is easy to be in possession of some facts, extraordinarily difficult to know the truth.

Productive open work will only result in standards as long as the parties involved strive to follow prior art in every way possible. Gratuitous innovation is when the standardization process ends, and usually that happens quickly.

Think about the process of arriving at a standard. Someone goes first with something new. Assume it catches on and becomes popular. Because the person did it in an open way, with no patents, or other barriers to competitors using the technology, a second developer decides to do the same thing. The innovator supports this, because he or she wants a standard to develop. At that point the second person has the power to decide how strong a standard it will be. If the new implementation strives to work exactly as the original does, then it's more likely the standard will be strong, and there will be a vibrant market around it. But if the second party decides to use the concept but not be technically compatible, it will be a weak standard. 

One would assume that the second mover would make every effort to do it exactly the same way as the first, but over the years, but this has not been the case. As soon as a standard becomes popular, market forces lead to multiple incompatible ways forward. Microsoft called this Embrace & Extend, but all technology vendors are driven to break standards. Standards can only go a short distance before forking defeats the standardization process. 

This is an extension to Postel's Law (the late Jon Postel was one of the key players of the development of the Internet), which says you should be liberal in what you accept and conservative in what you send. It goes further by saying that we should all collectively be conservative in what we send. This keeps the technology small and the market approachable by developers of all sizes. The large companies always try to make the technology complicated to reduce competition to other organizations with large research and development budgets.

Evolution applies positive feedback in that the more capable methods resulting from one stage of evolutionary progress are used to create the next stage. Each epoch of evolution has progressed more rapidly by building on the products of the previous stage.

Evolution works through indirection: evolution created humans, humans created technology, humans are now working with increasingly advanced technology to create new generations of technology. As a result, the rate of progress of an evolutionary process increases exponentially over time.

Over time, the "order" of the information embedded in the evolutionary process (i.e., the measure of how well the information fits a purpose, which in evolution is survival) increases.

A comment on the nature of order.

The concept of the "order" of information is important here, as it is not the same as the opposite of disorder. If disorder represents a random sequence of events, then the opposite of disorder should imply "not random." Information is a sequence of data that is meaningful in a process, such as the DNA code of an organism, or the bits in a computer program. Noise, on the other hand, is a random sequence. Neither noise nor information is predictable. Noise is inherently unpredictable, but carries no information. Information, however, is also unpredictable. If we can predict future data from past data, then that future data stops being information. We might consider an alternating pattern ("0101010. . . .") to be orderly, but it carries no information (beyond the first couple of bits).

Thus orderliness does not constitute order because order requires information. However, order goes beyond mere information. A recording of radiation levels from space represents information, but if we double the size of this data file, we have increased the amount of data, but we have not achieved a deeper level of order.

Order is information that fits a purpose. The measure of order is the measure of how well the information fits the purpose. In the evolution of life-forms, the purpose is to survive. In an evolutionary algorithm (a computer program that simulates evolution to solve a problem) applied to, say, investing in the stock market, the purpose is to make money. Simply having more information does not necessarily result in a better fit. A superior solution for a purpose may very well involve less data.

The concept of "complexity" is often used to describe the nature of the information created by an evolutionary process. Complexity is a close fit to the concept of order that I am describing, but is also not sufficient. Sometimes, a deeper order—a better fit to a purpose—is achieved through simplification rather than further increases in complexity. For example, a new theory that ties together apparently disparate ideas into one broader more coherent theory reduces complexity but nonetheless may increase the "order for a purpose" that I am describing. Indeed, achieving simpler theories is a driving force in science. Evolution has shown, however, that the general trend towards greater order does generally result in greater complexity.

Thus improving a solution to a problem—which may increase or decrease complexity—increases order. Now that just leaves the issue of defining the problem. Indeed, the key to an evolution algorithm (and to biological and technological evolution) is exactly this: defining the problem. 

We may note that this aspect of "Kurzweil’s Law" (the law of accelerating returns) appears to contradict the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which implies that entropy (randomness in a closed system) cannot decrease, and, therefore, generally increases. However, the law of accelerating returns pertains to evolution, and evolution is not a closed system. It takes place amidst great chaos, and indeed depends on the disorder in its midst, from which it draws its options for diversity. And from these options, an evolutionary process continually prunes its choices to create ever greater order. Even a crisis, such as the periodic large asteroids that have crashed into the Earth, although increasing chaos temporarily, end up increasing—deepening—the order created by an evolutionary process.

• A primary reason that evolution—of life-forms or of technology—speeds up is that it builds on its own increasing order, with ever more sophisticated means of recording and manipulating information. Innovations created by evolution encourage and enable faster evolution. In the case of the evolution of life forms, the most notable early example is DNA, which provides a recorded and protected transcription of life’s design from which to launch further experiments. In the case of the evolution of technology, ever improving human methods of recording information have fostered further technology. The first computers were designed on paper and assembled by hand. Today, they are designed on computer workstations with the computers themselves working out many details of the next generation’s design, and are then produced in fully-automated factories with human guidance but limited direct intervention. 

• The evolutionary process of technology seeks to improve capabilities in an exponential fashion. Innovators seek to improve things by multiples. Innovation is multiplicative, not additive. Technology, like any evolutionary process, builds on itself. This aspect will continue to accelerate when the technology itself takes full control of its own progression. 

• We can thus conclude the following with regard to the evolution of life-forms, and of technology: the law of accelerating returns as applied to an evolutionary process: An evolutionary process is not a closed system; therefore, evolution draws upon the chaos in the larger system in which it takes place for its options for diversity; and evolution builds on its own increasing order. Therefore, in an evolutionary process, order increases exponentially.

• A correlate of the above observation is that the "returns" of an evolutionary process (e.g., the speed, cost-effectiveness, or overall "power" of a process) increase exponentially over time. We see this in Moore’s law, in which each new generation of computer chip (now spaced about two years apart) provides twice as many components, each of which operates substantially faster (because of the smaller distances required for the electrons to travel, and other innovations). This exponential growth in the power and price-performance of information-based technologies—now roughly doubling every year—is not limited to computers, but is true for a wide range of technologies, measured many different ways. 

• In another positive feedback loop, as a particular evolutionary process (e.g., computation) becomes more effective (e.g., cost effective), greater resources are deployed towards the further progress of that process. This results in a second level of exponential growth (i.e., the rate of exponential growth itself grows exponentially). For example, it took three years to double the price-performance of computation at the beginning of the twentieth century, two years around 1950, and is now doubling about once a year. Not only is each chip doubling in power each year for the same unit cost, but the number of chips being manufactured is growing exponentially. 

• Biological evolution is one such evolutionary process. Indeed it is the quintessential evolutionary process. It took place in a completely open system (as opposed to the artificial constraints in an evolutionary algorithm). Thus many levels of the system evolved at the same time. 

• Technological evolution is another such evolutionary process. Indeed, the emergence of the first technology-creating species resulted in the new evolutionary process of technology. Therefore, technological evolution is an outgrowth of—and a continuation of—biological evolution. Early stages of humanoid created technology were barely faster than the biological evolution that created our species. Homo sapiens evolved in a few hundred thousand years. Early stages of technology—the wheel, fire, stone tools—took tens of thousands of years to evolve and be widely deployed. A thousand years ago, a paradigm shift such as the printing press, took on the order of a century to be widely deployed. Today, major paradigm shifts, such as cell phones and the world wide web were widely adopted in only a few years time. 

• A specific paradigm (a method or approach to solving a problem, e.g., shrinking transistors on an integrated circuit as an approach to making more powerful computers) provides exponential growth until the method exhausts its potential. When this happens, a paradigm shift (a fundamental change in the approach) occurs, which enables exponential growth to continue. 

• Each paradigm follows an "S-curve," which consists of slow growth (the early phase of exponential growth), followed by rapid growth (the late, explosive phase of exponential growth), followed by a leveling off as the particular paradigm matures. 

• During this third or maturing phase in the life cycle of a paradigm, pressure builds for the next paradigm shift, and research dollars are invested to create the next paradigm. We can see this in the enormous investments being made today in the next computing paradigm—three-dimensional molecular computing—despite the fact that we still have at least a decade left for the paradigm of shrinking transistors on a flat integrated circuit using photolithography (Moore’s Law). Generally, by the time a paradigm approaches its asymptote (limit) in price-performance, the next technical paradigm is already working in niche applications. For example, engineers were shrinking vacuum tubes in the 1950s to provide greater price-performance for computers, and reached a point where it was no longer feasible to shrink tubes and maintain a vacuum. At this point, around 1960, transistors had already achieved a strong niche market in portable radios. 

• When a paradigm shift occurs for a particular type of technology, the process begins a new S-curve. 

• Thus the acceleration of the overall evolutionary process proceeds as a sequence of S-curves, and the overall exponential growth consists of this cascade of S-curves. 

• The resources underlying the exponential growth of an evolutionary process are relatively unbounded.

• One resource is the (ever-growing) order of the evolutionary process itself. Each stage of evolution provides more powerful tools for the next. In biological evolution, the advent of DNA allowed more powerful and faster evolutionary "experiments." Later, setting the "designs" of animal body plans during the Cambrian explosion allowed rapid evolutionary development of other body organs, such as the brain. Or to take a more recent example, the advent of computer-assisted design tools allows rapid development of the next generation of computers.

• The other required resource is the "chaos" of the environment in which the evolutionary process takes place and which provides the options for further diversity. In biological evolution, diversity enters the process in the form of mutations and ever- changing environmental conditions. In technological evolution, human ingenuity combined with ever-changing market conditions keep the process of innovation going. 

• If we apply these principles at the highest level of evolution on Earth, the first step, the creation of cells, introduced the paradigm of biology. The subsequent emergence of DNA provided a digital method to record the results of evolutionary experiments. Then, the evolution of a species that combined rational thought with an opposable appendage (the thumb) caused a fundamental paradigm shift from biology to technology. The upcoming primary paradigm shift will be from biological thinking to a hybrid combining biological and nonbiological thinking. This hybrid will include "biologically inspired" processes resulting from the reverse engineering of biological brains. 

• If we examine the timing of these steps, we see that the process has continuously accelerated. The evolution of life forms required billions of years for the first steps (e.g., primitive cells); later on progress accelerated. During the Cambrian explosion, major paradigm shifts took only tens of millions of years. Later on, Humanoids developed over a period of millions of years, and Homo sapiens over a period of only hundreds of thousands of years. 

• With the advent of a technology-creating species, the exponential pace became too fast for evolution through DNA-guided protein synthesis and moved on to human-created technology. Technology goes beyond mere tool making; it is a process of creating ever more powerful technology using the tools from the previous round of innovation, and is, thereby, an evolutionary process. As I noted, the first technological took tens of thousands of years. For people living in this era, there was little noticeable technological change in even a thousand years. By 1000 AD, progress was much faster and a paradigm shift required only a century or two. In the nineteenth century, we saw more technological change than in the nine centuries preceding it. Then in the first twenty years of the twentieth century, we saw more advancement than in all of the nineteenth century. Now, paradigm shifts occur in only a few years time. 

• The paradigm shift rate (i.e., the overall rate of technical progress) is currently doubling (approximately) every decade; that is, paradigm shift times are halving every decade (and the rate of acceleration is itself growing exponentially). So, the technological progress in the twenty-first century will be equivalent to what would require (in the linear view) on the order of 200 centuries. In contrast, the twentieth century saw only about 20 years of progress (again at today’s rate of progress) since we have been speeding up to current rates. So the twenty-first century will see about a thousand times greater technological change than its predecessor.

Experiments take pi times longer than planned (no matter how many factors of pi you account for).

Gershenfeld's Law on Writing

Good [theses, papers, books] are never finished, just abandoned.

Gershenfeld's Goal

Function from form.

"Form follows function" implies that they're separable; the most profound scientific and technological insights that I know follow from abstracting logical functions from physical forms.

To understand what people are thinking and feeling, look beyond what they say. Language does not capture the full range and grain of thought and experience, and its unique power enables us as easily to mask our thoughts and feelings as it does to express them.

Segre’s First Law

Numbers are everything.

This is just a rephrasing of the Pythagorean credo, proclaimed 2500 years ago, that “All things are numbers”. Science began with it, but it’s still worth remembering that measurements are at the base of all science.

Segre’s Second Law

Understand what the numbers mean.

One has to keep looking for a theory that will explain the numbers. Our galaxy has a hundred billion stars and our brain has a hundred billion neurons. Understanding our galaxy and our brain are great challenges, but two different theories are required.

Barondes' First Law

Science abhors contradictions; scientist's minds are replete with them.

Barondes' Second Law

Self-understanding is inherently inaccurate because most of our knowledge comes from specific behavioral experiences that are often inconsistent; and our mechanisms of learning are designed to store memories whether or or not their implications are formally contradictory.

Warwick's First Law

Art takes you out of town, and gives you a destination. Science builds the bus that takes you there.

Art, at its best, takes you out of your town, your home, your living room, your armchair, your mind, and brings you some place—a destination, a wonderful place, a new way of looking at things, a deep shift in your understanding of what it means to be human with a sense of profundity and awe at the Creation, pointing toward a new and better environment for living, smiling a new smile—all by altering your consciousness in some useful and insightful way.

Cooking up the better paint or programming didn't make the better paintmaker a better painter, or the better word processor-maker a better writer, but the great painter required the skills of the better paint makers and the great writer needs the tool of the trade. If we are to go to these grand destinations, artists need the insights and tools provided by science—the " bus" to take us there. And we need to heed Art.

Warwick's Second Law

Art tells the jokes that science insists on explaining.

Arthur's First Law

High-tech markets are dominated 70-80% by a single player—product, company, or country.

The reason: Such markets are subject to increasing returns or self-reinforcing mechanisms. Therefore an initial advantage—often bestowed by chance—leads to increasing advantage and eventually heavy market domination. (Absent government intervention, of course).

Arthur's Second Law

As technology advances it becomes ever more biological.

We are leaving an age of mechanistic, fixed-design technologies, and entering an age of metabolic, self-reorganizing technologies. In this sense, as technology becomes more advanced it becomes more organic—therefore more "biological." Further, as biological mechanisms at the cellular and DNA levels become better understood, they become harnessed and co-opted as technologies. In this century, biology and technology will therefore intertwine.

Arthur's Third Law

The modularization of technologies increases with the extent of the market.

Just as it pays to create a specialized worker if there is sufficient volume of throughput to occupy that specialty, it pays to create a standard prefabricated assembly, or module, if its function recurs in many instances. Modularity therefore is to a technological economy what the division of labor is to a manufacturing one—it increases as the economy expands.

In any random population, of those who score in the above-average range on tests of empathizing, females will significantly outnumber males. And of those who score in the above-average range on tests of systemizing, males will significantly outnumber females.

Baron-Cohen's Law of Autism

What unites individuals on the autistic spectrum is impaired empathizing in the presence of intact or even superior systemizing, relative to non-autistic individuals of the same mental age.

is an extension of Schank's Law

On any important topic, we tend to have a dim idea of what we hope to be true, and when an author writes the words we want to read, we tend to fall for it, no matter how shoddy the arguments. Needy readers have an asymptote at illiteracy; if a text doesn't say the one thing they need to read, it might as well be in a foreign language. To be open-minded, you have to recognize, and counteract, your own doxastic hungers.

Uncertainty is the final test of innovation.

That is, new concepts are tested best by a sudden faltering confidence on the part of the innovator operating in an almost-liminal, almost-sure intellectual state.

Does not the palpable quiver preceding the sudden rush of certainty give that 
final kick to real innovation? 

This is especially good for interdisciplinary areas, where unusual conjunctions 
generally involve more maverick trip-wire than usual.

Ridley's First Law

Science is the discovery of ignorance. It is not a catalog of facts.

Ridley's Second Law

Experience affects an organism largely by switching genes on and off. (Nurture works through nature.)

Ridley's Third Law

Neither the number of base pairs nor the number of genes in an organism's genome bears much if any relation to that organism's size or complexity.

Don't ask what they think. Ask what they do.

My rule has to do with paradigm shifts—yes, I do believe in them. I've been through a few myself. It is useful if you want to be the first on your block to know that the shift has taken place. I formulated the rule in 1974. I was visiting the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) for a weeks to give a couple of seminars on particle physics. The subject was QCD. It doesn't matter what this stands for. The point is that it was a new theory of sub-nuclear particles and it was absolutely clear that it was the right theory. There was no critical experiment but the place was littered with smoking guns. Anyway, at the end of my first lecture I took a poll of the audience. "What probability would you assign to the proposition 'QCD is the right theory of hadrons.'?" My socks were knocked off by the answers. They ranged from .01 percent to 5 percent. As I said, by this time it was a clear no-brainer. The answer should have been close too 100 percent.

The next day I gave my second seminar and took another poll. "What are you working on?" was the question. Answers: QCD, QCD, QCD, QCD, QCD,........ Everyone was working on QCD. That's when I learned to ask "What are you doing?" instead of "what do you think?"

I saw exactly the same phenomenon more recently when I was working on black holes. This time it was after a string theory seminar, I think in Santa Barbara. I asked the audience to vote whether they agreed with me and Gerard 't Hooft or if they thought Hawkings ideas were correct. This time I got a 50-50 response. By this time I knew what was going on so I wasn't so surprised. Anyway I later asked if anyone was working on Hawking's theory of information loss. Not a single hand went up. Don't ask what they think. Ask what they do.

The biosphere advances, on average, at the maximum rate it can sustain into the adjacent possible.

The adjacent possible, for a chemical reaction graph, is the set of novel molecules that can be created out of those existing now. The biosphere has advanced into the chemical adjacent possible over the history of life.The issue is, are there laws that govern this advance? And so too for technology. I'm very unsure about my candidate law, but at least it points to the reality that we do advance into the adjacent possible and perhaps some law governs how we do so.

For every important function that a cell needs to carry out Nature has created a gadget to make it more efficient.

(Gadgets are macromolecular complexes made from proteins, RNA, and DNA and often have hundreds of parts.)

Thanks for the invitation, but this time I will pass: I am too much of an anarchist: the only laws I like are scientific ones, and the idea of some normative statement being labeled, even if just for fun, "Sperber's Law", makes me shudder. Sorry! (But I will enjoy reading the "laws" of other people).

Anderson's First Law (of the Experienced Science Journalist)

Science may be objective but scientists are not.

Anderson's Second Law (of the Experienced Science Journalist)

A scientist who can speak without jargon is either an idiot or a genius.

Anderson's Third Law (on Subjectivity and Objectivity from the Interface of Neuroscience and Computers)

The bigger the brain, the better the stories it fabricates for us.

Corollary

The more technology gives us the power to record and store everything, the less it captures reality.

laws on subjectivity and objectivity from the interface of Neuroscience and Computers

Anderson's Fourth Law (for ordinary folk)

Science can produce knowledge but it cannot produce wisdom.

Anderson's Fifth Law (Based on An Ancient Zen Saying to An Untutored Monk Seeking Wisdom)

If you can tell the false from the true you are already a scientist.

Poundstone's First Law

Independent discoverers of great ideas emerge in proportion to the time spent looking for them. The history of science is a fractal, with co-discoverers emerging like crinkles in the Norwegian coastline.

Poundstone's Second Law

The fractal dimension of scientific discovery increases with time. Where people once marveled at the simultaneous discovery of calculus, we now marvel when a Nobel science prize goes to one person.

Snyder's First Law

The most creative science is wrong, but the deception ultimately leads to the benefit of mankind. Think Freud!

Snyder's Second Law

Everyone steals ideas from everyone else, but they do so unconsciously. This has evolved for our very survival. It maximizes the innovative power of society.

Simonyi's Law of Guaranteed Evolution

Anything that can be done, could be done "meta".

The future is merely the past with a twist—and better tools.

Randall's First Law

Non-existence "theorems", which state something cannot happen, are untrustworthy; they are only statements about what we have seen or thought of so far. Non-existence theorems often appear in physics. They are useful guidelines, but there are often loopholes. Sometimes you find those loopholes by looking—and sometimes you find them by accident through superficially unrelated research

Randall's Second Law

Studies confirming Baron-Cohen's First Law will always reflect the bias of the investigator.

Adaptations stockpile information in environments as well as in genes.

The Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdos used to describe himself as a "machine for turning coffee into theorems". In much the same way, genes are machines for turning stars into a bird's compass; carotenoids into males of dazzling beauty; smells into love-potions; facial muscles into signals of friendship; a glance into uncertainty of paternity; and oxygen, water, light, zinc, calcium and iron into bears, beetles, bacteria or bluebells. More strictly, genes are machines for turning stars into birds and thereby into more genes.

This reminds us that adaptations weld together two information-storage systems. They build up a store of information in genes, meticulously accumulated, elaborated and honed down evolutionary time. And, to match that store, they also stockpile information in the environment. For genes need resources to build and run organisms; and adaptations furnish genes (or organisms) with the information to pluck those resources from the environment. So stars and carotenoids and glances need to be there generation after generation no less reliably than the information carried by genes.

Thus genes and environments are not in opposition; not zero-sum; not parallel but separate. Rather, they are designed to work in tandem. Their interconnection is highly intricate, minutely structured; and it becomes ever more so over evolutionary time. 

And thus, without environments to provide resources, genes would not be viable; and without genes to specify what constitutes an environment, environments would not exist. So how could biology not be an environmental issue? And, conversely, how could environments not be—necessarily—a biological issue?

Cronin's law of adaptations and environments

What constitutes an organism's environment depends on the species' adaptations.

What constitutes an organism's environment? The answer is that it is the organism's adaptations that stake out which are the relevant aspects of the world. An environment is not simply a given. It is the typical characteristics of a species, its adaptations, that specify what constitutes the environment for that species.

Think of it this way. Adaptations are keys to unlocking the world's resources. They are the means by which organisms harness features of the world for their own use, transforming them from part of the indifferent world-out-there into the organism's own tailor-made, species-specific environment, an environment brimming with materials and information for the organism's own distinctive adaptive needs. 

And so to understand how any species interacts with its environment, we need to start by exploring that species' adaptations. Only through adaptations was that environment constructed and only through understanding adaptations can we reconstruct it.

And, similarly, within a sexually reproducing species, differences between the sexes should be the default assumption. In particular, the female's adaptations should not be treated as mere adumbrations of the male's. On the contrary, if a rule-of-thumb default is needed, turn to the female. After all, the 'little brown bird' is what the entire species—males, females and juveniles—looks like before sexual selection distorts her mate into a showy explosion of colour and song. When it comes to environments, males perceive them as platforms for status games. Females most certainly do not.

Technology once trickled down from supercomputers to PCs. Now new computing technology comes to game machines first.

Corollary

The companies who make the fastest computers are the ones that make things that go under Xmas trees.

A public figure is often condemned for an action that is taken unfairly out of context but nevertheless reflects, in a compelling and encapsulated manner, an underlying truth about that person.

Eno's First Law

Culture is everything we don't have to do

We have to eat, but we didn't have to invent Baked Alaskas and Beef Wellington. We have to clothe ourselves, but we didn't have to invent platform shoes and polka-dot bikinis. We have to communicate, but we didn't have to invent sonnets and sonatas. Everything we do—beyond simply keeping ourselves alive—we do because we like making and experiencing art and culture.

Eno's Second Law

Science is the conversation about how the world is. Culture is the conversation about how else the world could be, and how else we could experience it.

Science wants to know what can be said about the world, what can be predicted about it. Art likes to see which other worlds are possible, to see how it would feel if it were this way instead of that way. As such art can give us the practice and agility to think and experience in new ways - preparing us for the new understandings of things that science supplies.

In a dangerous world there will always be more people around whose prayers for their own safety have been answered than those whose prayers have not.

[Think about it.]

Gelernter's First Law

Computers make people stupid.

Gelernter's Second Law

One expert is worth a million intellectuals. (This law is only approximate.)

Gelernter's Third Law

Scientists know all the right answers and none of the right questions.

When devaluated information makes opinion an added value, the law of literalism is permanently questioned, while remaining the last resort of reason.

The inflation of available information has devaluated word and image to mere content. The resulting perception fatigue is increasingly met with the overused rhetorical tool of polarizing opinion. It’s based on an old trick used by street vendors. In the intellectual food court of mass media, opinion appeals to reflexes just as the fried fat and sugar smells of snackfood outlets activate age-old instincts of hunting and gathering. In the average consumer opinion triggers an illusion of enlightenment and understanding that ultimately clouds the reason of literalism.

Literalism is freedom from credo, dogma and philosophical pessimism. It’s the process of finding reality driven by an optimistic faith in its existence. It tries to transcend the limits of the word, by permanently questioning any perception of reality.

Belief and ideology, the strongest purveyors of opinion, have long known the language of science and reason. Creationists use secular reasoning to demand that schools stop teaching the laws of evolution. Right-wing radicals and religious fundamentalists of all creeds tone down their world visions to fit into an opinionated consensus. Economic and political forces use selective findings to present their interests as fact.

Literalism can become an exhausting effort to defend the principles of fact and reason in a polarized world. The complex and often boring nature of factual reality makes it an unglamorous voice amid a choir of sparkling witticisms and provocations. Devoid of the ecstasies and spiritual cushioning of religion it denies age old longings. It can be decried as heresy or simultaneously accused of treason by all sides. It must sustain the insecurities brought on by the absence of ultimate truth. Having been the gravitational center of enlightenment, it must be defended as the last resort of reason.