Test Equipment Anonymous

Which laws / adages / dictums / etc should every child be taught? The guiding principal principle is that during their lives they will find many circumstances in which they apply.

Here's my quick list. What's yours?

Acton's dictum: "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely"

Amara's law: "We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run." Named after Roy Amara

Betteridge's law of headlines: "any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word 'no'".

Clarke's second law: The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

Crane's law: there is no such thing as a free lunch

Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which people who are unskilled in some area wrongly believe their ability is higher than average; they don't know enough about the subject to accurately measure their aptitude.

Finagle's law: "Anything that can go wrong, will—at the worst possible moment." And Murphy, of course.

Goodhart's law: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

Gresham's law : "Bad money drives good money out of circulation",

Hanlon's razor : "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity."

Hitchens's razor : "That which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence."

Occam's razor: When two or more explanations are offered for a phenomenon, the simplest full explanation is preferable.

Peter principle: "In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence."

Russell's teapot: the burden of proof of an empirically unfalsifiable claim lies upon the person making the claim, rather than it being accepted unless disproved.

Sagan standard: Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Sturgeon's law: "Ninety percent of everything is crud."

I've shamelessly cribbed those from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_l ... ter_people

tggzzz wrote: ↑Thu Oct 22, 2026 10:39 am The guiding principal is that during their lives they will find many circumstances in which they apply.

AAARGH! Write 256 lines; "I SHALL notice the difference between principles and principals." To remind you, when speaking of schools, we hope that the principal has principles.

Other than that, very useful, although I thought it was Napoleon who came up with the one ascribed to Hanlon. I particularly like the Dunning/Kruger effect; it's only when you know quite a bit about something that you realise how ignorant you are.

EC8010 wrote: ↑Thu Oct 22, 2026 11:23 am

tggzzz wrote: ↑Thu Oct 22, 2026 10:39 am The guiding principal is that during their lives they will find many circumstances in which they apply.

AAARGH! Write 256 lines; "I SHALL notice the difference between principles and principals." To remind you, when speaking of schools, we hope that the principal has principles.

Araargh indeed; corrected. It might have been due to autokorrupt on a tablet, but I can't be certain. I can be certain I know the difference and that getting it wrong annoys me as much as you!

Ditto "insure" and "ensure". When people mistakenly use "insure", I wonder how much that insurance cost.

Other than that, very useful, although I thought it was Napoleon who came up with the one ascribed to Hanlon. I particularly like the Dunning/Kruger effect; it's only when you know quite a bit about something that you realise how ignorant you are.

As you get older you realise that the people who really do understand something are all too aware of the limits of that knowledge. They either ask supplemental questions and/or add many caveats to their responses. Especially with yoootooob, far too high a proportion of videos make very confident statements making me thing of Russell and Hitchen. And they are rewarded for such statements

I was influenced by snippets I heard from the radio programme "The Brains Trust"[*]. Immediately after a general question, one of the panel said "it depends on what you mean by that. If X then..."

[*] incomprehensible and impossible nowadays. The past is a foreign country.

I remember the Brains Trust, but Russell and Hitchen?

EC8010 wrote: ↑Thu Oct 22, 2026 4:23 pm I remember the Brains Trust, but Russell and Hitchen?

As mentioned in the first post. Sorry for being too terse.

I was ticked off the other day for working at the lathe in dressing gown. "You're not wrecking that expensive dressing gown are you?"

I wake up everyday and thank the Almighty.