{"id":2953,"date":"2020-04-13T18:18:37","date_gmt":"2020-04-13T22:18:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/schlaff.com\/wp\/?page_id=2953"},"modified":"2025-02-02T12:50:23","modified_gmt":"2025-02-02T17:50:23","slug":"rules-of-thumb","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/schlaff.com\/wp\/almanac\/tips-on-living\/rules-of-thumb\/","title":{"rendered":"Ideas Named After People"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<div class=\"wp-block-columns is-layout-flex wp-container-core-columns-is-layout-9d6595d7 wp-block-columns-is-layout-flex\">\n<div class=\"wp-block-column is-layout-flow wp-block-column-is-layout-flow\" style=\"flex-basis:100%\">\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-column is-layout-flow wp-block-column-is-layout-flow\"><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n<p>In ancient times, people had wisdom, aphorisms and&nbsp;rules of thumb they would put into Almanacs. In the current lingo, they&#8217;re called&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/fs.blog\/mental-models\/\">mental models<\/a>.&nbsp; If you&#8217;re interested in this stuff <a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/dp\/0525533583\/ref=cm_sw_r_tw_dp_U_x_eRd8DbSBYVTJ1\">Super Thinking<\/a> by Gabriel Weinberg is a great book on mental models written in narrative form. Here&#8217;s a list of some of my favorite bits of knowledge from around the web \u2014 some because they are useful, others because they are just fun. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Ideas Named after People<\/h3>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/psmag.com\/social-justice\/theres-a-name-for-that-the-baader-meinhof-phenomenon-59670\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon.\u00a0<\/a>The feeling that something you just learned about seems to appear everywhere<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Bechdel_test\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Bechdel Test.<\/a>\u00a0A method for evaluating the portrayal of women in fiction taken from a\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Bechdel_test\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">comic from\u00a0Alison Bechdel from 1985.<\/a> The test states that the movie has to have at least two women in it who talk to each other about something besides a man.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Betteridge\u2019s Law.\u00a0<\/a>Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no. There&#8217;s a great\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/betteridgeslaw?lang=en\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Betteridge&#8217;s Law Twitter feed.<\/a><\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Devil%27s_advocate\">Devil&#8217;s Advocate<\/a>. We all know what this is, but I never knew it was named for The Devil. The advocatus diaboli (Latin for Devil&#8217;s advocate) used to be a position in the Catholic Church. That person would take the position of The Devil and argued against canonization (sainthood) to uncover any ungodly traits or misdeeds of the candidate.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Dunning-Kruger Effect.<\/a>\u00a0The term comes from the article \u201cUnskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One\u2019s Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments.\u201d It\u2019s a scientific description of someone who is too dumb to know it. Here\u2019s\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=wvVPdyYeaQU&amp;feature=share\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">John Cleese with a video explanation<\/a>\u00a0of the effect. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=rW9R6jgE7SQ\">Stephen Fry has a good one too<\/a>.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect\">Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect.<\/a> The phenomenon where someone recognizes media inaccuracies in their field of expertise but assumes the same source is reliable when reading about topics they know less about.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Godwin%27s_law\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Godwin\u2019s Law.<\/a>\u00a0If an online discussion (regardless of topic or scope) goes on long enough, sooner or later someone will compare someone or something to Adolf Hitler. The corollary is\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/19991011095714\/http:\/\/www.faqs.org\/faqs\/usenet\/legends\/godwin\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">that the thread immediately ends and this person loses the argument<\/a>.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Goodhart%27s_law\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Goodhart&#8217;s Law.<\/a>\u00a0When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Anytime a metric becomes a target, people will try to game it.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Hanlon%27s_razor\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Hanlon\u2019s Razor.<\/a>\u00a0 Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Occam%27s_razor\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Occam&#8217;s Razor.<\/a>\u00a0 Occam&#8217;s Razor says that the simplest solution is most likely correct. Though they&#8217;re historically unrelated, I tend to think of Occam&#8217;s Razor with the\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Gordian_Knot\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">Gordian Knot<\/a>. This was the story of Alexander the Great who untangled an impossible knot by cutting it with his sword. I always think of Occam&#8217;s Razor as the act of cutting the Gordian Knot.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Overton_window\">Overton Window<\/a>. The acceptable spectrum of political opinion. As popular opinion becomes more liberal or conservative, the range of acceptable opinions in the Overton Window shifts accordingly.\u00a0<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Parkinson%27s_law\">Parkinson&#8217;s Law<\/a>. Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.\u00a0<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Law_of_triviality\">Parkinson&#8217;s Law of Triviality<\/a>. Organizations give disproportionate weight to trivial issues. In the 1957 book <em>Parkinson&#8217;s Law<\/em>, Parkinson discussed a budget committee discussing a nuclear reactor and a bike shed. The reactor was complicated and esoteric so no one wanted to discuss it. Everyone had an opinion on the bike shed, no matter how unimportant it was.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Sayre%27s_law\">Sayre&#8217;s Law<\/a>. In any dispute, the intensity of feeling is proportional to the value of the issues at stake. My favorite formulation is <a href=\"https:\/\/quoteinvestigator.com\/2013\/08\/18\/acad-politics\/\">Academic Politics Are So Vicious Because the Stakes Are So Small<\/a>.\u00a0<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Stigler%27s_law_of_eponymy\">Stigler&#8217;s law of Eponymy<\/a>. University of Chicago statistics professor Stephen Stigler states that no scientific discovery is named after its original discoverer. (Added 7\/2020)<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Streisand_effect\">Streisand Effect<\/a>. The phenomenon whereby an attempt to hide, remove, or censor a piece of information has the unintended consequence of publicizing the information more widely. It is named for Barbara Streisand who in 2003 tried to get the picture of her house deleted from an environmental study of 12,000 coastline photographs. The lawsuit and the ensuring coverage raised the viewership of the photo from 6 to 400,000. <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Streisand_effect\">You can see Barbara&#8217;s house here<\/a>.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In ancient times, people had wisdom, aphorisms and&nbsp;rules of thumb they would put into Almanacs. In the current lingo, they&#8217;re called&nbsp;mental models.&nbsp; If you&#8217;re interested in this stuff Super Thinking by Gabriel Weinberg is a great book on mental models written in narrative form. Here&#8217;s a list of some of my favorite bits of knowledge [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":2941,"menu_order":2,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-2953","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/P8wCkz-LD","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":2941,"url":"https:\/\/schlaff.com\/wp\/almanac\/tips-on-living\/","url_meta":{"origin":2953,"position":0},"title":"Tips on Living","author":"Robert Schlaff","date":"April 13, 2020","format":false,"excerpt":"Living a Good Life. Here's a set of things about how to be a better person and live a good life. My favorites are Randy Pausch and Brene Brown but there's a healthy helping of David Allen and Stephen Covey in there too.Tips and Tricks. 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