The Laws of Life, Fact-Checked

True idea, shaky label

The real story

Vilfredo Pareto, an Italian economist, studied how unevenly wealth was spread; the popular story is that he found about a fifth of Italians held four-fifths of the land. But the universal “principle” is not his. The quality engineer Joseph Juran stretched the pattern to everything in his 1951 Quality Control Handbook, calling it the “vital few and trivial many” and borrowing Pareto’s name as a handy label. In the 1970s he published a confession titled “The Non-Pareto Principle; Mea Culpa”.

Where it breaks

80/20 is a rule of thumb. The real split might be 90/10 or 70/30, and Juran himself later preferred “useful many”, because the remaining work still matters.

Try today: List what you did last week. Circle the two things that actually moved something. Do those first tomorrow.

Older cousin: Seneca and Pascal on a scattered mind

True idea, shaky label

The real story

We could not find a recognised “Law of Familiarity”. The idea, though, is very old. Chaucer’s Tale of Melibee (about 1386) has it as a saying already in circulation: “over-greet hoomlynesse engendreth dispreisynge”, too much homeliness breeds contempt.

Where it breaks

Psychology found close to the opposite. In 1968 Robert Zajonc showed that simply seeing something repeatedly tends to make us like it more: the mere exposure effect. A 2017 review of the research found that liking rises with exposure, then falls away when it goes on too long. So familiarity warms us first, and dulls us later.

Try today: Look at one person or thing you see every day as if for the first time. Say out loud what you would miss.

Older cousin: Epicurus, the Buddha and the hedonic treadmill

Solid history

The real story

There was a real Murphy. Edward Murphy was an engineer on the US Air Force’s MX981 rocket-sled tests at Muroc (now Edwards Air Force Base) in 1948–49, led by Dr John Paul Stapp. The best-known account has a sensor wired wrongly and Murphy grumbling about it; Stapp then helped spread the phrase. Those present remembered the details differently.

The thought is older than Murphy. In a talk to the Institution of Civil Engineers on 13 November 1877, the shipowner Alfred Holt said: “It is found that anything that can go wrong at sea generally does go wrong sooner or later.”

Where it breaks

It is not physics. We remember the toast that fell butter-side down and forget the rest. Its real use, then and now, is as a design rule: assume the failure, and build so it cannot hurt you.

Try today: Before your next important thing, ask “what is the most likely way this goes wrong?” and fix that one thing.

Older cousin: the Stoics, who rehearsed misfortune in advance

Solid history

The real story

The maths is simply true: growth on top of growth accelerates. What is false is the famous credit. “The eighth wonder of the world” was not said by Einstein. The line appears in a 1925 newspaper advertisement, and Princeton’s The Ultimate Quotable Einstein files it under “Probably Not by Einstein”.

Where it breaks

Nothing compounds forever at a steady rate. Skills plateau, habits lapse, and markets fall. But the direction of the lesson survives: what you repeat matters more than what you do once.

Try today: Pick one action small enough to do on your worst day. Do it now.

Older cousin: Aristotle on habit and Musashi’s ten thousand days

True idea, shaky label

The real story

Lucius Cary, 2nd Viscount Falkland, was an English politician arguing about the power of bishops in 1641. His line is reported as: “where it is not necessary to change, it is necessary not to change.” He was talking about changing institutions. The internet quietly swapped “change” for “decide”, and we could not find who first called it a law.

Where it breaks

Not deciding is also a decision, and some delays cost more than a wrong choice. It works only when waiting is free and new facts may arrive.

Try today: For one decision that is troubling you, write the date it truly must be made. Until then, leave it alone.

Older cousin: Laozi and the art of not forcing

No traceable source

The real story

Web pages credit a “Robert Wilson”, without a book, a speech or a date. At least one credits someone else entirely. We could not find where it began, so we cannot tell you who Wilson was, or whether there ever was one.

Where it breaks

It is a hope, not a law. Knowledge can help you earn, but history is full of brilliant people who stayed poor. Spinoza ground lenses for a living and turned down a professorship at Heidelberg to keep his freedom of thought. He may have thought that the better bargain.

Try today: Learn one thing because it interests you, with no plan to earn from it.

Older cousin: Seneca, Epicurus and Diogenes on how much is enough

No traceable source

The real story

Many pages say Kidlin is a character in James Clavell’s novel Snow Tiger. That looks wrong: The Snow Tiger (1975) is by Desmond Bagley, and we could not confirm a Kidlin in it. The name remains a mystery.

The idea is much better documented. In Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (1938), John Dewey called it already “a familiar and significant saying that a problem well put is half-solved.” A similar line is often credited to the inventor Charles Kettering.

Where it breaks

“Half” is a figure of speech. Some clearly written problems stay very hard. But vague worry cannot be solved at all, so naming the problem is still the first step.

Try today: Write what is bothering you in one sentence, then rewrite it until a stranger could understand it.

Older cousin: Socrates, who began by asking what a word really means

True idea, shaky label

The real story

C. Northcote Parkinson, a naval historian, published a satirical essay in The Economist on 19 November 1955. Here is the twist: the famous line was only his opening remark, which he called a commonplace observation. What he named “Parkinson’s Law” was the rest of the essay, about officials multiplying whether or not there is more work, as the Admiralty’s staff grew while its ships declined.

Where it breaks

It began as a joke, and it is not a measurement. Tight deadlines can also produce rushed, poor work.

Try today: Take one task you have been circling and give it a deadline of today.

Older cousin: Seneca on wasted time

True idea, shaky label

The real story

Those are not Goodhart’s words. In 1975 the economist Charles Goodhart wrote, about British monetary policy, that “any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes.” The neat modern version comes from the anthropologist Marilyn Strathern, writing about education in 1997.

Where it breaks

Measures are still useful. The trouble starts when the number is rewarded and the thing it stood for is forgotten.

Try today: Pick one number you check often. Write down what it was meant to measure.

Older cousin: Epictetus on the true price of every prize

Solid history

The real story

Laurence Peter and Raymond Hull published it in 1969 as a farcical theory of how organisations fail. Then someone tested it. A 2019 study by Alan Benson, Danielle Li and Kelly Shue, covering sales workers at 131 firms, found that the best salespeople were the most likely to be promoted, and tended to make weaker managers.

Where it breaks

That study covers sales roles, and the same researchers found that firms partly adjust for the problem. Plenty of people grow into their promotions.

Try today: If you are chasing a promotion, ask what the next job actually involves each day.

Older cousin: Chanakya on statecraft and choosing well

Solid history

The real story

The statistician Stephen Stigler stated it in a 1980 essay honouring the sociologist Robert Merton, and credited the idea to Merton. So the law is named after someone who says he did not discover it. Others had noticed the same thing before them.

Where it breaks

“No” is an exaggeration, and Stigler knew it. Some discoveries do carry the right name.

Try today: Credit one person today for something they never got thanked for.

Older cousin: Quotes They Never Said, where the same thing happens to words

True idea, shaky label

The real story

The science-fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon was tired of critics dismissing his whole genre as junk. His reply, in talks in the 1950s and in print soon after: yes, ninety percent of it is crud, but so is ninety percent of everything. He called that “Sturgeon’s Revelation”. The label “Sturgeon’s Law”, in his own use, belonged to a different saying: “Nothing is always absolutely so.”

Where it breaks

Ninety is a rhetorical number. And “crud” is often only what is not for you.

Try today: Think of a genre you dismiss. Ask someone who loves it for their single best example.

Older cousin: Seneca, who advised a few good books over many

Solid history

The real story

Douglas Hofstadter wrote it in Gödel, Escher, Bach (1979), while discussing how computer chess champions kept seeming a decade away. The joke is that the law includes itself. Psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky gave the serious version a name around the same time: the planning fallacy.

Where it breaks

Some things do finish on time, especially tasks you have done many times before.

Try today: Before you promise a date, check how long something similar really took.

Older cousin: Memento Mori: how many Mondays are left?

True idea, shaky label

The real story

It is named after Lindy’s, a New York deli where comedians gathered. In 1964 Albert Goldman wrote about the comedians’ theory of how long a career could last before the material ran out. The mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot later reworked the idea, and Nassim Taleb gave it its modern form in Antifragile (2012): for ideas and technologies, past survival predicts future survival.

Where it breaks

It applies to things that do not age the way bodies do, and only as a tendency. Old institutions and old prejudices also collapse.

Try today: Swap one article today for a page of something at least a thousand years old.

Older cousin: Texts that have outlasted empires

Solid history

The real story

In 2003 Barbra Streisand sued photographer Kenneth Adelman over an aerial picture of her Malibu home, part of a project recording coastal erosion. The picture had been downloaded six times, twice by her lawyers. The lawsuit made it an internet sensation and was dismissed. Mike Masnick of Techdirt coined the name in 2005.

Where it breaks

Not everything suppressed goes viral. We only hear about the cases where hiding failed; quiet removals rarely make the news.

Try today: Next time something small annoys you online, try not replying at all.

Older cousin: Socrates, whose execution made sure he would be read for ever

True idea, shaky label

The real story

That famous wording is not in William of Ockham’s surviving works. It comes from the theologian John Punch in 1639, who called it a common axiom. Ockham, a 14th-century friar, did write something close: “Plurality must never be posited without necessity.” The principle was around before him too.

Where it breaks

It does not say the simplest explanation is true. It says not to add assumptions you do not need. Sometimes reality is complicated.

Try today: When something goes wrong today, list the explanation with the fewest assumptions first.

Older cousin: The empiricists, who trusted what experience could show

Solid history

The real story

It appeared in Arthur Bloch’s joke collection Murphy’s Law Book Two (1980), credited only to “Hanlon”. Quote Investigator traced him to Robert J. Hanlon, a computer programmer from Scranton, Pennsylvania. Robert Heinlein had written something similar in a 1941 story.

Where it breaks

Real malice exists, and the powerful often benefit when harm is excused as a mistake. It is a first guess, not a verdict.

Try today: Take the last message that upset you. Write the most innocent explanation you can.

Older cousin: Marcus Aurelius, who expected difficult people every morning

Solid history

The real story

G. K. Chesterton made the argument in The Thing (1929), in a chapter called “The Drift from Domesticity”. A reformer sees a fence across a road and wants it gone because he sees no use for it. Chesterton’s reply: “Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”

Where it breaks

Some fences were built for bad reasons and should come down. Asking why it exists is the start of the inquiry, not an excuse to keep everything.

Try today: Before changing a rule at home or work, find out who made it and why.

Older cousin: Confucius, who said he passed on more than he invented

True idea, shaky label

The real story

Christopher Hitchens wrote a version of it in a 2003 article, and repeated it in God Is Not Great (2007). The idea is much older. It is close to a Latin proverb, quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur: what is freely asserted is freely denied.

Where it breaks

Dismissing a claim is not the same as disproving it. Absence of evidence may just mean nobody has looked yet.

Try today: Find one thing you repeat to others. Could you say where you learned it?

Older cousin: Hume on proportioning belief to evidence