Category / Useful Laws of the Land / Wednesday Wisdom

“Passion is inversely proportional to the amount of real information available.” The line appeared in science fiction author Gregory Benford’s book Timescape. Data has a way of keeping excitement in check, whereas if…

Social measures of performance distort the performance of the thing you’re measuring. Psychologist Donald Campbell wrote in 1976: Achievement tests may well be valuable indicators of general school achievement under conditions as normal teaching…

Remove everything from writing that doesn’t need to be there. Novelist Anton Chekhov wrote: “Remove everything that has no relevance to the story. If you say in the first chapter that there…

The amount of attention a problem gets is the inverse of its importance. Laid out in historian Cyril Parkinson’s book Parkinson’s Law, which wrote: The time spent on any item of the agenda…

The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question. It’s to post the wrong answer. Coined by programmer Ward Cunningham, it’s familiar to anyone…

We underestimate long periods of time and overestimate short periods of time. Nineteenth-century physiologist Karl von Vierordt spent most of his career studying how people perceive time. His biggest finding is the opposite of…

Performance increases with anxiety and excitement, but only to a point. Formed by psychologists Robert Yerkes and John Dodson in the early 20th century, it looks like this: At one level, excitement increases…