Three Curious Laws Of Life
When talking about curious laws of life , reference is made to a series of principles that have been empirically validated. There are recurring events and good observers have been able to identify them; later, with them they have formulated a law or axiom that the majority accepts.
The curious laws of life form an open and extensive list. As for the most popular, for example, the famous Murphy’s Laws would be included. Although in most cases there is no research to support their sentences, the truth is that they seem to operate frequently.
These invisible principles that govern reality often bear the name of the one who formulated them. Several of them were great personalities of science and culture, with enough observation and intuition skills to detect patterns in everyday life. The following are three of those curious laws of life.
1. Hofstadter’s Law
One of those curious laws of life is that of Hofstader. His approach is reminiscent of Murphy’s Laws. This principle applies to the completion of complex tasks and says the following: “It always takes us longer than expected, even taking into account Hofstadter’s law.”
This law was raised by Douglas Hofstadter in his work Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal and Graceful Loop , which was published in 1979. In fact, it anecdotally raises something that we all verify at some time: it is practically impossible to calculate precisely the time we must spend on a complicated task.
In the professional world, software developers made this law famous. In many cases, when they had to budget for the hours it was going to take them to implement a certain functionality, they were hardly right or close to the real thing.
On the other hand, outside of this context it has also been found that we tend to underestimate the hours that a complex task is going to take us. At the business level, to solve this problem, what are known as agile methodologies have been developed.
2. Hick, one of the curious laws of life
Hick’s Law, also known as the Hick-Hyman Law, is named after psychologists William Edmund Hick and Ray Hyman. It is actually a law expressed in a mathematical formula according to which the time it takes a person to make a decision increases exponentially as the number of options increases.
Put more simply, it means that the more alternatives, the more time we invest in making an important decision. That time can be calculated using a logarithm. To reach that conclusion, Hick and Hyman conducted several experiments. In the same way, Hick and Hyman, with their mathematical calculations, showed that the amount of time spent making the decision was related to the IQ index.
The most interesting of all is that this law applies to video games. The designers make the players make decisions with more or less options depending on the tension they want to generate in the player. Thus, they try to make a game not overwhelming, but not boring either.
Hick’s Law does not apply to complex decisions ; that is, those in which the options or risks involved require careful analysis. Instead, it operates universally on simple decisions.
3. Hutber’s Law
Within a selection of the curious laws of life, Hubter’s law cannot be absent. This is a pessimistic principle, first put forward in 1970 by Patrick Hutber, an economist and journalist who was editor of The Sunday Telegraph in London, for a decade.
The law is very simple and states the following: “improvement means deterioration. ” We can see that it works by looking at the political and economic decisions of governments. In fact, it became so popular that it was cited by the House of Commons, in Great Britain, in one of its debates.
It has also been invoked in fields such as engineering, risk analysis and business. In all these areas it maintains its essence: when it comes to making a modification to improve something, in the long run, the consequence is deterioration in some aspect. It could be considered a variant of the famous phrase “if something works, don’t change it.”
