Laws — Thomas Valadez

Aesthetic-Usability Effect

Users often perceive aesthetically pleasing design as design that’s more usable.

Choice Overload

The tendency for people to get overwhelmed when they are presented with a large number of options, often used interchangeably with the term paradox of choice.

Chunking

A process by which individual pieces of an information set are broken down and then grouped together in a meaningful whole.

Cognitive Bias

A systematic error of thinking or rationality in judgment that influence our perception of the world and our decision-making ability.

Cognitive Load

The amount of mental resources needed to understand and interact with an interface.

Doherty Threshold

Productivity soars when a computer and its users interact at a pace (<400ms) that ensures that neither has to wait on the other.

Fitts’s Law

The time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to and size of the target.

Flow

The mental state in which a person performing some activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity.

Goal-Gradient Effect

The tendency to approach a goal increases with proximity to the goal.

Hick’s Law

The time it takes to make a decision increases with the number and complexity of choices.

Jakob’s Law

Users spend most of their time on other sites. This means that users prefer your site to work the same way as all the other sites they already know.

Law of Common Region

Elements tend to be perceived into groups if they are sharing an area with a clearly defined boundary.

Law of Proximity

Objects that are near, or proximate to each other, tend to be grouped together.

Law of Prägnanz

People will perceive and interpret ambiguous or complex images as the simplest form possible, because it is the interpretation that requires the least cognitive effort of us.

Law of Similarity

The human eye tends to perceive similar elements as a complete picture, shape, or group, even if those elements are separated.

Law of Uniform Connectedness

Elements that are visually connected are perceived as more related than elements with no connection.

Mental Model

A compressed model based on what we think we know about a system and how it works.

Miller’s Law

The average person can only keep 7 (plus or minus 2) items in their working memory.

Occam’s Razor

Among competing hypotheses that predict equally well, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected.

Paradox of the Active User

Users never read manuals but start using the software immediately.

Pareto Principle

The Pareto principle states that, for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.

Parkinson’s Law

Any task will inflate until all of the available time is spent.

Peak-End Rule

People judge an experience largely based on how they felt at its peak and at its end, rather than the total sum or average of every moment of the experience.

Postel’s Law

Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send.

Selective Attention

The process of focusing our attention only to a subset of the stimuli in the environment — usually those related to our goals.

Serial Position Effect

Users have a propensity to best remember the first and last items in a series.

Tesler’s Law

Tesler’s Law, also known as The Law of Conservation of Complexity, states that for any system there is a certain amount of complexity which cannot be reduced.

Von Restorff Effect

The Von Restorff effect, also known as The Isolation Effect, predicts that when multiple similar objects are present, the one that differs from the rest is most likely to be remembered.

Working Memory

A cognitive system that temporarily holds and manipulates information needed to complete tasks.

Zeigarnik Effect

People remember uncompleted or interrupted tasks better than completed tasks.

Murphy's Law

If something can go wrong, it will.

Brook's Law

Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.

Hofstadter's Law

It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter's Law.

Conway’s Law

Any piece of software reflects the organizational structure that produced it.

The Peter Principle

In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.

Kerchkhoff's Principle

In cryptography, a system should be secure even if everything about the system, except for a small piece of information - the key - is public knowledge.

Linus's Law

Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.

Moore's Law

The power of computers per unit cost doubles every 24 month.

Wirth's law

Software gets slower faster than hardware gets faster.

Ninety-ninety rule

The first 90% of the code takes 10% of the time. The remaining 10% takes the other 90% of the time

Knuth's optimization principle

Premature optimization is the root of all evil.

Norvig's Law

Any technology that surpasses 50% penetration will never double again (in any number of months).

Zipf’s Law

The frequency of a word is roughly inversely proportional to its rank — the most common token appears about twice as often as the second most common, and so on.

Heaps’ Law

The size of a corpus’s vocabulary grows sub-linearly as more text is added — roughly as a power of the number of tokens.

Shannon’s Information Theorem

The information in a message equals the surprise of its outcome — the negative logarithm of its probability — and entropy is the expected surprise of a source.

Nyquist–Shannon Sampling Theorem

A continuous signal can be perfectly reconstructed from samples taken at more than twice its highest frequency — the Nyquist rate.

Sturgeon’s Law

Ninety percent of everything is crap — quality is rare in any sufficiently large field, including science and machine output.

Lindy Effect

The future life expectancy of a non-perishable thing is proportional to its current age — what has survived longer is likely to survive longer still.

Metcalfe’s Law

The value of a network grows with the square of the number of its users — roughly n² — because each new member connects to every existing one.

Benford’s Law

In many real-world datasets, the leading digit 1 appears far more often than 9 — about 30% versus under 5% — following a logarithmic distribution.

Goodhart’s Law

When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

Garbage In, Garbage Out

The quality of a system’s output is bounded by the quality of its input — bad data or bad prompts produce bad results, no matter how good the machinery.

No Free Lunch Theorem

No learning algorithm is universally better than any other — averaged over all possible problems, every optimizer performs identically.

Amdahl’s Law

The speedup from parallelizing a computation is capped by the fraction of the work that must stay serial — 1/(1 − p + p/n).

Neural Scaling Laws

Language-model loss falls as a smooth power law of compute, data, and parameters — predictable returns from scaling each resource.

The Bitter Lesson

General-purpose methods that exploit scale keep defeating clever domain-specific tricks — the bitter lesson researchers relearn with every generation of AI.

Cobra Effect

An incentive designed to solve a problem can make it worse, because people respond to the incentive rather than to the problem.

Brandolini’s Law

The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude larger than the energy needed to produce it.

Hanlon’s Razor

Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity — or, more gently, by ignorance and error.

Hume’s Guillotine

You cannot derive an ought from an is — factual descriptions alone never justify value judgments.

Chesterton’s Fence

Do not remove a fence until you understand why it was put there — the reason may be invisible but vital.

Cunningham’s Law

The best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question, but to post the wrong answer.

Godwin’s Law

As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison to Nazis approaches one — and whoever makes it has effectively ended the useful argument.

Little’s Law

In a stable system, the average number of items in the system equals the average arrival rate times the average time each item spends inside: L = λW.

Baumol’s Cost Disease

Wages in labor-intensive sectors rise to match productivity-growing sectors even when their own productivity is stagnant — so their costs keep climbing.

Iron Law of Oligarchy

Any large organization, however democratic in intent, tends to fall under the control of a small elite that consolidates power.

Jevons Paradox

Making a resource more efficient can increase its total consumption, because cheaper use invites more use.

Law of Diminishing Returns

Beyond some point, each additional unit of input yields less additional output than the unit before it.

Universal Scalability Law

Throughput under concurrency rises, peaks, and then falls — limited by contention for shared resources and coherence overhead between participants.

Gall’s Law

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked — a complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched to work.

Dunning–Kruger Effect

People with low ability in a domain overestimate their competence, because the same missing skill prevents them from recognizing their errors.

Anchoring Effect

Judgments are biased toward an initial reference value, even when that anchor is arbitrary or irrelevant.

Framing Effect

The same choice presented in different frames — as a gain or a loss, a risk or a certainty — produces different decisions.

Loss Aversion

Losses hurt about twice as much as equivalent gains please, so people avoid losses more eagerly than they seek gains.

IKEA Effect

People value things they helped create more than identical things they did not, even when the help was trivial.

Halo Effect

A single positive impression of a person or thing spreads to color judgments of all its other attributes.

Curse of Knowledge

Once you know something, it becomes nearly impossible to imagine not knowing it — so experts misjudge what novices can understand.

Planning Fallacy

Plans are systematically overoptimistic — tasks take longer and cost more than predicted, even when past similar tasks ran late.

Spotlight Effect

People overestimate how much others notice their appearance and behavior — the spotlight of attention is mostly in their own head.

Sunk Cost Fallacy

Continuing an endeavor because of resources already spent, even when the rational choice is to abandon it — the past costs cannot be recovered either way.

Mere-Exposure Effect

Repeated exposure to a stimulus increases liking for it, even without conscious awareness of the exposure.

Second Law of Thermodynamics

In an isolated system, entropy never decreases — disorder tends to grow, and useful work is what it costs to push against that tendency.