My final List of Useful Maxims
This is my tenth group of the many short principles that help clarify reasoning, decision-making, or analysis. I am featuring some of them in a series of posts, expositing a few of them each time. Many of them are rule-of-thumb approaches that either avoid nonsense or reveal inner workings. Most are suggestive rather than universal.
28. Paco’s Law says that you spend whatever you have available to spend.
“My salary’s gone up by 20 percent, but I’m no richer.” Many of us have been there or seen it among our friends. Welcome to Paco’s Law. It expresses a simple truism that when you have more, you tend to spend more.
In David Copperfield by Charles Dickens, Micawber says, "Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds nought and six, result misery."
This is widely cited as a wise rule to follow in personal finance. Spend less than you earn. Unfortunately, human nature and Paco’s Law conspire against it. The tendency is to spend more if you have more. With more money, you can more often afford a taxi instead of a bus. You can afford to eat out more often, and to drink a more expensive bottle of wine. You can buy newer and more fashionable clothes, and take better holidays. There is no limit to the ways in which you can spend you extra cash.
In theory you can counter this by careful budgeting and put your surplus cash into a savings account. No-one seems to know who Paco was - maybe a fictional character like Micawber - but he recognized the essential human trait that the point of being richer is that you can live richer.
29. Twyman's Law tells us that surprising data, is likely to be wrong data.
We are surrounded by data, some of it useful, some not, some right, and some wrong. Twyman’s Law warns that if a statistic looks too good or too strange to be true, it almost certainly is.
We look for patterns and sometimes see them where they don’t exist. When we see really surprising connections, they probably don’t exist. The Welsh analyst who composed a grid to measure the neatness of handwriting in children in Wales was astounded to find that the children with bigger feet had neater handwriting. He took the data to a teacher, who told him that older children tended to have neater handwriting, and also had bigger feet.
The law says you should be suspicious about taking data at face value. Twyman’s Law tells us that, ‘The more unusual or interesting the data, the more likely they are to have been the result of an error of one kind or another’. This because errors and data manipulation are far more common than genuinely surprising results.
As a general rule, it cautions that the more boring the data, the more trustworthy it tends to be. Look out for the outliers. They are more likely to be a mistake rather than a breakthrough.
30. Brandolini's Law says it’s harder to refute bullshit than to publish it.
Italian programmer Alberto Brandolini coined the law to explain that it is much easier to spread misinformation than it is to refute it. It is time-consuming to delve into the absurd claims being made, and to do the research that reveals nonsense to be what it is.
As they say, “A lie is halfway around the world before the truth has got its boots on.” James Randi was someone who dedicated his life to debunking paranormal, supernatural, and pseudoscientific claims. He put in the time and the effort that most people would not, in order to refute claims of psychic power, Bermuda triangles and the like. Randi notably showed that Uri Geller’s alleged psychic powers were no more than cheap stage tricks regularly used by conjurers.
Some people, not most, are prepared to put in the effort to show that fake moon landing stories are themselves fake, and that vaccines do not introduce nano-particles into the bloodstream to trace people.
Brandolini’s Law is normally expressed as “The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.” And those who propagate bullshit take advantage of this. By the time someone has expended their time an energy to expose them, they have moved on to yet another conspiracy theory.
Madsen Pirie