# Edge 2004 Full Quotation Curation This is a source-first local curation of the complete Edge Annual Question response cohort, *WHAT'S YOUR LAW?*. It preserves every response row exposed by the aggregate archive as an indexed provenance object with contributor identity, response title, credentials when supplied by Edge, an exact representative extract, and its direct response page when the archive exposes one. It is a curation record rather than a claim that every extract has been promoted into Simple Reminders. - **Annual Question:** [WHAT'S YOUR LAW?](https://www.edge.org/annual-question/whats-your-law) - **Aggregate response archive:** [View all responses](https://www.edge.org/responses/whats-your-law) - **Archive year:** 2004 - **Response rows represented:** 162 - **Rows with substantive textual extracts:** 147 - **Rows without a substantive extract:** 15 - **Institutional router:** [[collections/Edge|Edge]] - **Promoted archive entries:** 0 - **Canonical reminder files linked:** 0 - **Not yet promoted:** 162 ## Editorial and provenance boundaries 1. Every extract below is copied from the downloaded Edge aggregate response archive and whitespace-normalized without changing its words. 2. The extract is representative, not a substitute for the full response; the linked response or aggregate page remains the provenance object. 3. Hypotheses, predictions, questions, provocations, and contested positions remain the contributor's claims rather than established facts. 4. Promotion into `reminders/` requires a separate standalone-passage, headline, category, source, routing, and reciprocal-link review. 5. This file records the entire archive cohort even when a response is outside the present consciousness-continuity and machine-succession trajectories. ## Complete response index ### EDGE2004-001 — Dyson's Law — George Dyson > Anything simple enough to be understandable will not be complicated enough to behave intelligently, while anything complicated enough to behave intelligently will not be simple enough to understand. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Science Historian; Author, Analogia - **Extract length:** 28 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Dyson's Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11980) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-002 — O'Donnell's Law — James J. O'Donnell > Because if it feels good, it's going to be because it eases some frustration you're feeling from all the constraints and hassles of the institution; or because it really shows up so-and-so; or because it makes you feel you really do have a little authority around here after all. It won't, it won't, and you don't. Better to calm down, make sure you know all the facts, make sure you've talked to all 49 stakeholders, and sleep on it, then do the thing you have to hold your nose to do. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Classics Scholar, University Librarian, ASU; Author, Pagans - **Extract length:** 91 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [O'Donnell's Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11916) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-003 — Gardner's Law — Howard Gardner > Don't ask how smart someone is; ask in what ways is he or she smart. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education, Harvard Graduate School of Education; Author, A Synthesizing Mind - **Extract length:** 15 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Gardner's Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11931) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-004 — Calvin's Law of Coherence — William H. Calvin > When things "all hang together," you have either gotten the joke, solved the puzzle, argued in a circle, focused your chain of logic so narrowly that you will be blindsided—or discovered a hidden pattern in nature. Science, in large part, consists of imagining coherent solutions and then making sure that you weren't fooled by a false coherence as in astrology. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Theoretical Neurobiologist; Affiliate Professor Emeritus, University of Washington; Author, Global Fever - **Extract length:** 60 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Calvin's Law of Coherence](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11948) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-005 — Sterling's Law — Bruce Sterling > First, your home is a constant, while the Net is a place you go; then the Net becomes a constant while your home is a place you go. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Science Fiction Author, Mirrorshades - **Extract length:** 28 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Sterling's Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11965) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-006 — Barrow's law — John D. Barrow > All difficult conjectures should be proved by reductio ad absurdum arguments. For if the proof is long and complicated enough you are bound to make a mistake somewhere and hence a contradiction will inevitably appear, and so the truth of the original conjecture is established QED. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Cosmologist; Physicist; Professor of Mathematical Science, Director, Millennium Mathematics Project, University of Cambridge; Author, The Book of Universes - **Extract length:** 46 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Barrow's law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11659) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-007 — Schank's Law — Roger Schank > Because people understand by finding in their memories the closest possible match to what they are hearing and use that match as the basis of comprehension, any new idea will be treated as a variant of something the listener has already thought of or heard. Agreement with a new idea means a listener has already had a similar thought and well appreciates that the speaker has recognized his idea. Disagreement means the opposite. Really new ideas are incomprehensible. The good news is that for some people, failure to comprehend is the beginning of understanding. For most, of course, it is the beginning of dismissal. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** CEO, Socratic Arts Inc.; John Evans Professor Emeritus of Computer Science, Psychology and Education, Northwestern University; Author, Make School Meaningful-And Fun! - **Extract length:** 104 words - **Trajectory signals:** `memory_and_persistence` - **Source:** [Schank's Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11825) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-008 — Goodwin's Limited Law — Brian Goodwin > The truth has as many faces as there are beings that express it. so no-one is ever wrong. everyone is right, though in limited ways. wisdom lies in spotting the limitation while being grateful for the insight. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Biology at Schumacher College - **Extract length:** 37 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Goodwin's Limited Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11674) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-009 — Traub's Law — Joseph Traub > The important things in life often happen by chance while we're agonizing over the trivia. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Computer Science, Columbia University; coauthor, Complexity and Information - **Extract length:** 15 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Traub's Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11840) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-010 — Kelly's Law — Kevin Kelly > *No substantive textual extract was present in the aggregate archive entry.* - **Status:** `no_substantive_extract` - **Credentials:** Senior Maverick, Wired; Author, What Technology Wants and The Inevitable - **Extract length:** 6 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Kelly's Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11689) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-011 — Gilbert' Law — Daniel Gilbert > Happy people are those who do not pass up an opportunity to laugh at themselves or to make love with someone else. Unhappy people are those who get this backwards. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Psychology at Harvard University - **Extract length:** 30 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Gilbert' Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11855) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-012 — Devlin's Law — Keith Devlin > Buyer beware: in the hands of a charlatan, mathematics can be used to make a vacuous argument look impressive. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Mathematician; Executive Director, H-STAR Institute, Stanford; Author, Finding Fibonacci - **Extract length:** 19 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Devlin's Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11552) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-013 — McWhorter's Law of Social History — John McWhorter > In a context of widespread literacy, easy communications, and a large class of people with ample leisure time, the social movement that begins by addressing a concrete grievance will, after the grievance has been largely addressed, pass into the hands of persons inclined for individual reasons towards the dramatic and self-righteous, who will manipulate the movement's iconography and passion into a staged indignation difficult for outsiders to square with reality, and with little actively progressive or beneficent intention. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Linguistics and Western Civilization, Columbia University; Cultural Commentator; Author, Words on the Move - **Extract length:** 78 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [McWhorter's Law of Social History](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11704) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-014 — Pepperberg's Law of Comparative Cognition — Irene Pepperberg > Any behavior exhibited by young children that is taken as evidence of the early emergence of intelligence will, when subsequently exhibited by nonhumans, be interpreted by many humans as a set of simple stimulus-response associations lacking cognitive processing, whereas the stimulus-response explanation will rarely be used to re-interpret the behavior of the child. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Research Associate & Lecturer, Harvard; Author, Alex & Me - **Extract length:** 53 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [Pepperberg's Law of Comparative Cognition](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11870) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-015 — Trehub's Law — Arnold Trehub > For any experience, thought, question, or solution there is a corresponding analog in the biophysical state of the brain. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Psychologist, University of Massachusetts, Amherst; Author, The Cognitive Brain - **Extract length:** 19 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [Trehub's Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11567) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-016 — Paulos' Law of Coincidence — John Allen Paulos > People often note some unlikely conjunction of events and marvel at the coincidence. Could anything be more wonderfully improbable, they wonder. The answer is Yes. The most amazing coincidence of all would be the complete absence of coincidence. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** professor of mathematics at Temple University - **Extract length:** 38 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Paulos' Law of Coincidence](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11719) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-017 — Lykken'st Law — David Lykken > The mind consists of genetically-determined hardware and experientially-determined software. The hardware components are not constructed by genes working either individually or additively but, rather, by groups of genes working sequentially and configurally. Each human mating produces at least some gene configurations that are unique, having never occurred previously. This is why, among other things, human genius often occurs uniquely in an otherwise undistinguished family line. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Behavioral Geneticist and Emeritus Professor, University of Minnesota - **Extract length:** 65 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [Lykken'st Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11885) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-018 — Nesmith's Law — Michael Nesmith > *No substantive textual extract was present in the aggregate archive entry.* - **Status:** `no_substantive_extract` - **Credentials:** Existence is Non-Time, Non-Sequential, and Non-Objective - **Extract length:** 7 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [Nesmith's Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11568) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-019 — Dyson's Law of Obsolescence — Freeman Dyson > If you are writing history and try to keep it up-to-date up to a time T before the present, it will be out-of-date within a time T after the present. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Physicist, Institute of Advanced Study; Author, Disturbing the Universe; Maker of Patterns - **Extract length:** 30 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Dyson's Law of Obsolescence](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11734) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-020 — Hauser's Law — Unattributed Edge contributor > Every uniquely human ability, including cooking, mathematics, morality, and music, is based on a set of biologically primitive capacities that evolved before our species walked the earth. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Extract length:** 27 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Hauser's Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11901) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-021 — Myers' Law — David G. Myers > Nine in ten managers rate themselves as superior to their average peer. Nine in ten college professors rated themselves as superior to their average colleague. And six in ten high school seniors rate their "ability to get along with others" as in the top 10 percent. Most drivers–even most drivers who have been hospitalized after accidents–believe themselves more skilled than the average driver. "The one thing that unites all human beings, regardless of age, gender, religion, economic status or ethnic background," observes Dave Barry, "is that deep down inside, we all believe that we are above average drivers." Excess humility is an uncommon flaw. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Psychology, Hope College; Co-author, Psychology, 11th Edition - **Extract length:** 104 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Myers' Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11583) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-022 — Nisbett's Law — Richard Nisbett > When you have the beginnings of an idea about something, the worst thing to do is to consult "the literature" before you get started to work on it. You are sure to assimilate your potentially original idea to something that is already out there. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Theodore M. Newcomb Distinguished University Professor of Psychology, University of Michigan; Author, Thinking: A Memoir - **Extract length:** 44 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Nisbett's Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11749) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-023 — Rheingold's Law — Howard Rheingold > Communication media that enable collective action on new scales, at new rates, among new groups of people, multiply the power available to civilizations and enable new forms of social interaction. The alphabet enabled empire and monotheism, the printing press enabled science and revolution, the telephone enabled bureaucracy and globalization, the Internet enabled virtual communities and electronic markets, the mobile telephone enabled smart mobs and tribes of urban info-nomads. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Communications Expert; Author, Smart Mobs - **Extract length:** 68 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Rheingold's Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11598) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-024 — Taylor's Law — Timothy Taylor > *No substantive textual extract was present in the aggregate archive entry.* - **Status:** `no_substantive_extract` - **Credentials:** Jan Eisner Professor of Archaeology, Comenius University in Bratislava; Author, The Artificial Ape - **Extract length:** 7 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Taylor's Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11764) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-025 — Siler's Law — Todd Siler > The brain is what the brain creates. Its workings reflect the workings of everything it creates. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Founder and director of Psi-Phi Communications - **Extract length:** 16 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [Siler's Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11614) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-026 — Rovelli's Two Principles — Carlo Rovelli > The physical world does not exist "in space". The physical world is made by an ensemble of particles and fields, which do not live in an external space, but rather live "on each other", and which can be in a relation of contiguity with respect to one another. "Space" is the order implied by this relation. These two principles are implied by what we have learned about the physical world with general relativity and with quantum mechanics. The second principle is largely a return to the Pre-Newtonian relational understanding of space, while the first has few antecendents in our culture. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Theoretical Physicist; Aix-Marseille University, in the Centre de Physique Théorique, Marseille, France; Author, Helgoland; There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness - **Extract length:** 100 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Rovelli's Two Principles](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11779) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-027 — Curtis' Law — Garniss Curtis > With several unknown keys in hand, one of which fits the lock in front of you, the first time you try all the keys, none will open it. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Geochronologist Emeritus, University of California, Berkeley - **Extract length:** 28 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Curtis' Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11629) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-028 — Sabbagh's Law — Karl Sabbagh > The biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has occurred. I think this is the more original and far-reaching of the two laws but I have put it second because it's not really mine. It was said to me by Alan Mulally, an inspiring Boeing manager (and they need inspiring managers at the moment.) - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Producer; Founder, Managing Director, Skyscraper Productions; Author, The Antisemitism Wars: How the British Media Failed Their Public - **Extract length:** 56 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Sabbagh's Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11795) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-029 — Minsky's Law — Marvin Minsky > *No substantive textual extract was present in the aggregate archive entry.* - **Status:** `no_substantive_extract` - **Credentials:** Mathematician; computer scientist; Professor of Media Arts and Sciences, MIT; cofounder, MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory; author, The Emotion Machine - **Extract length:** 3 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Minsky's Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11644) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-030 — Rushkoff's Law — Douglas Rushkoff > A religion will increase in social value until a majority of its members actually believe in it—at which point the social damage it causes will increase exponentially as long as it is in existence. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Media Analyst; Documentary Writer; Author, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus - **Extract length:** 34 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Rushkoff's Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11810) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-031 — McCorduck's Law — Pamela McCorduck > A linear projection into the future of any science or technology is like a form of propaganda — often persuasive, almost always wrong. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Author, Machines Who Think, The Universal Machine, Bounded Rationality, This Could Be Important; Co-author (with Edward Feigenbaum), The Fifth Generation - **Extract length:** 23 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [McCorduck's Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11493) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-032 — Pimm's Law — Stuart Pimm > With every change in language (including first contact with humanity), a region's biodiversity shrinks by 20%. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Doris Duke Chair of Conservation Ecology, Duke University; Author, The World According to Pimm: a Scientist Audits the Earth - **Extract length:** 16 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Pimm's Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11164) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-033 — Hut's Law — Piet Hut > When writing a large software package or a whole software environment, the most efficient way to produce a robust product is to write documentation simultaneously with the computer codes, on all levels: from comment lines to manual pages to narrative that explains the reasons for the many choices made. Having to explain to yourselves and your coworkers how you choose what why when is the best guide to quickly discovering hidden flaws and better alternatives, minimizing the need to backtrack later. Therefore, the most efficient way to write a large coherent body of software as a research project is to view it as an educational project. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** professor of astrophysics at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton - **Extract length:** 106 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [Hut's Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11329) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-034 — Skoyles' Law — John R. Skoyles > Human culture and human cognition exists because the brain's neural plasticity allows learned symbolic associations to substitute for the innate inputs and outputs of already evolved ape cognitions, a process that extends greatly their functionality. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** researcher in the evolution of human intelligence in the light of recent discoveries about the brain - **Extract length:** 35 words - **Trajectory signals:** `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [Skoyles' Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11508) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-035 — Provine's Law — Robert Provine > Self is distinguished from other by a neurological cancellation process. These definitions are attractive because they permit a neurologically and computationally based approach to problems that are traditionally mired in personality and social theory. Although our sense of identity involves more than self/non-self discrimination, such a mechanism may be at its foundation and a first step toward the evolution of personhood and the neurological computation of its boundaries. For a demonstration of this mechanism, consider your inability to tickle yourself. Tickle requires stimulation by a non-self animate entity on the surface of your skin. Similar, self-produced stimulation is cancelled and is not ticklish. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor Emeritus, University of Maryland, Baltimore County; Author, Curious Behavior: Yawning, Laughing, Hiccupping, and Beyond - **Extract length:** 103 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `machine_intelligence`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Provine's Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11179) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-036 — Brand's Law — Stewart Brand > Brand's Shortcut The only way to predict the future is to make sure it stays exactly the same as the present. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Founder, the Whole Earth Catalog; Co-founder, The Well; Co-Founder, The Long Now Foundation, and Revive & Restore; Author, Whole Earth Discipline - **Extract length:** 21 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Brand's Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11346) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-037 — Maddox's Law — Sir John Maddox > Reviewers who are best placed to understand an author's work are the least likely to draw attention to its achievements, but are prolific sources of minor criticism, especially the identification of typos. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Editor (Emeritus), Nature; Royal Commissions on environmental pollution and genetic manipulation - **Extract length:** 32 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Maddox's Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11523) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-038 — De Vany's Law — Arthur De Vany > *No substantive textual extract was present in the aggregate archive entry.* - **Status:** `no_substantive_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor Emeritus of Economics and Mathematical Behavioral Sciences, University of California - **Extract length:** 6 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [De Vany's Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11194) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-039 — Epstein's Law — Unattributed Edge contributor > The key question is not what can I gain but what do I have to lose. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Extract length:** 16 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Epstein's Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11362) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-040 — Gopnik's Learning Curve — Alison Gopnik > The male curve is an abrupt rise followed by an equally abrupt fall. The female curve is a slow rise to an extended asymptote. The areas under the curves are roughly equal. These curves apply to all activities at all time scales (e.g. attention to TV programs, romantic love, career scientific productivity). - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Psychologist, UC, Berkeley; Author, The Gardener and the Carpenter - **Extract length:** 52 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Gopnik's Learning Curve](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11209) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-041 — Kosslyn's Law — Stephen M. Kosslyn > The individual and the group are not as separate as they appear to be. A part of each mind spills over into the minds of other people, who help us think and regulate our emotions. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Founding Dean, Minerva Schools at the Keck Graduate Institute - **Extract length:** 35 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [Kosslyn's Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11379) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-042 — Kasper's Law — Raphael Kasper > "... we often hear it said, or we say it ourselves, I'll get used to it, we say or they say, with what seems to be genuine acceptance ..., what no one asks is at what cost do we get used to things." - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** physicist, is Associate Vice Provost for Research at Columbia University and was Associate Director of the Superconducting Super Collider Laboratory - **Extract length:** 43 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Kasper's Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11224) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-043 — Ogilvy's Law — Jay Ogilvy > • Dismissing teleology does not deny a manifest directionality to evolution. In each of these cases and many others like them, the deconstructive turn should not be confused with nihilism or deflationary debunking. The value of Ogilvy's Law lies in its ability to help predict which valleys harbor real value, and which peaks are better left undefended - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** a cofounder of GBN, a Partner in the Monitor Group of Companies - **Extract length:** 57 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Ogilvy's Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11394) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-044 — Blackmore's Law — Susan Blackmore > People's desire to believe in the paranormal is stronger than all the evidence that it does not exist. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Psychologist; Visiting Professor, University of Plymouth; Author, Consciousness: An Introduction - **Extract length:** 18 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Blackmore's Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11239) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-045 — Atran's Law — Scott Atran > The major events that determine human history follow a power distribution (a more or less straight line on a log-log scale), with catastrophic and cascading consequences (economic and health crises, political and cultural revolutions, war and terrorism, etc.), because people naturally prefer to act upon the future based on their modeling of past occurrences. People do not repeat the catastrophes of history because they forget it; people build up self-destructing ideologies and behavior patterns that continue history's catastrophic path because they remember the past too well (e.g., "the maginot effect" for war and the soon-to-be "box-cutting effect" for terrorism). - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Anthropologist; Emeritus Research Director, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Institut Jean Nicod, Paris; Co-Founder, Centre for the Resolution of Intractable Conflict, University of Oxford; Author, Talking to the Enemy - **Extract length:** 99 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `memory_and_persistence`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Atran's Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11410) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-046 — Dehaene's Law — Stanislas Dehaene > Every successful human invention such as arithmetic or the alphabet has a "neuronal niche"—a set of cerebral processors that evolved for a distinct purpose, but can be recycled to implement the new function. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Neuroscientist; Collège de France, Paris; Author, How We Learn - **Extract length:** 33 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Dehaene's Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11254) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-047 — Dyson's Law — Esther Dyson > How can we instead devise some rule that fits the best qualities of the Net decentralized, more or less self-enforcing, flexible.....and responsive to personal choices? The idea is to create a culture thatexpects disclosure, rather than a legal regime that requires it. People can decide how much they want to play, and others can decide whether to play with them. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Investor; Chairman, EDventure Holdings; Executive Founder, Wellville; Author: Release 2.0 - **Extract length:** 60 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [Dyson's Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11425) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-048 — Rabkin's Rule — Richard Rabkin > If you don't understand something, it's because you aren't aware of its context. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Psychiatrist - **Extract length:** 13 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Rabkin's Rule](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11269) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-049 — Bunnell's Law — David Bunnell > Everything is stored somewhere. The secret to retrieving things is simply finding out where they are stored. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Founder, PC Magazine, PC World, Macworld, Macworld Expo, New Media and BioWorld - **Extract length:** 17 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Bunnell's Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11448) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-050 — Hoffman's Law — Donald D. Hoffman > Just as the virtual worlds experienced in VR arcades are interfaces that allow the arcade user to interact effectively with an unseen world of computers and software, so also the physical world one experiences daily is a species-specific user interface that allows one to survive while interacting with a world of which one may be substantially ignorant. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Cognitive Scientist, UC, Irvine; Author, The Case Against Reality - **Extract length:** 57 words - **Trajectory signals:** `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Hoffman's Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11284) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-051 — Arthur's Law — Charles Arthur > Nothing is evenly spread; everything happens in clumps. The universe has clumps—galaxies, star systems, stars, planets, asteroids. You meet an old friend for the first time in years, then again and again. The smart folk are all together. It's a universal. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Freelance Technology Journalist - **Extract length:** 41 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Arthur's Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11463) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-052 — Taleb's Law — Nassim Nicholas Taleb > We don't learn the First Black Swan Law from experience, yet we think that we learn something from it. Abstract subject matters (and metarules) do not affect our risk avoidance mechanisms; only vivid images do. People did not learn from the WTC (and the succession of similar events in history such as the formation of financial bubbles) that we have a horrible track record in forecasting such occurrences. They just learned the specific task to avoid tall buildings and Islamic terrorists—after the fact. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering, New York University School of Engineering ; Author, Incerto (Antifragile, The Black Swan...) - **Extract length:** 83 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Taleb's Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11299) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-053 — Anderson's Law — Philip W. Anderson > *No substantive textual extract was present in the aggregate archive entry.* - **Status:** `no_substantive_extract` - **Credentials:** Nobel Laureate; Physicist - **Extract length:** 3 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Anderson's Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11478) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-054 — Miller's Law — Geoffrey Miller > People who don't understand genetics attribute their personal failings to the inane role models offered by their parents. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Evolutionary psychologist, NYU Stern Business School and University of New Mexico; author of The Mating Mind and Spent - **Extract length:** 18 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Miller's Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11314) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-055 — Blakemore's Law — Colin Blakemore > The only form of intelligence that really matters is the capacity to predict. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Chief Executive, Medical Research Council;Waynflete Professor of Physiology, University of Oxford - **Extract length:** 13 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Blakemore's Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11020) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-056 — Venter's Law — J. Craig Venter > We have the tools for the first time in the history of humanity to answer virtually any question about biology and our own evolution. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** A leading scientist of the 21st century for Genomic Sciences; Co-Founder, Chairman, Synthetic Genomics, Inc.; Founder, J. Craig Venter Institute; Author, A Life Decoded - **Extract length:** 24 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Venter's Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10878) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-057 — Shermer's Law — Michael Shermer > (These principles were derived from a scientific analysis of the evolutionary origins of the moral sentiments and the historical development of evolutionary ethics. The Zeroeth Principle, which precedes the three principles, first evolved hundreds of thousands of years ago but was first codified in writing by the world's great religious leaders and has come down to us as the golden rule. The foundation of the Zeroeth Principle, and the three derivative principles is, in evolutionary theory, reciprocal altruism and the process of reciprocity.) - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Publisher, Skeptic magazine; Monthly Columnist, Scientific American; Presidential Fellow, Chapman University; Author, Heavens on Earth - **Extract length:** 83 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Shermer's Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11034) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-058 — Dawkins's Law — Richard Dawkins > When two incompatible beliefs are advocated with equal intensity, the truth does not lie half way between them. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Evolutionary Biologist; Emeritus Professor of the Public Understanding of Science, Oxford; Author, Books Do Furnish a Life - **Extract length:** 18 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Dawkins's Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10893) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-059 — Ernst Law — Ernst Pöppel > Not to see, but to see. Some years ago (1973) we described a phenomenon that patients with a certain brain injury show some residual vision although they do not have a conscious representation of their remained visual capacity. They can orient in space, or they can discriminate simple patterns, but they do not know that they can do it. This phenomenon became known as "blindsight". Apparently there is a lot of implicit processing going in our brain that lacks an explicit representation, but which usually is associated with conscious experience. Interestingly, the phenomenon of blindsight not only made a "career" in the neurosciences, but also in philosophy. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Head of Research Group Systems, Neuroscience and Cognitive Research, Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich, Germany; Guest Professor, Peking University, China - **Extract length:** 107 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Ernst Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11047) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-060 — Finkelstein's Law — David Finkelstein > *No substantive textual extract was present in the aggregate archive entry.* - **Status:** `no_substantive_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor Emeritus, School of Physics, Georgia Institute of Technology - **Extract length:** 3 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Finkelstein's Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10907) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-061 — Aunger's Law — Robert Aunger > Human life is unique in being the result of three coevolving information inheritance systems: genes, minds and technology. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Biological Anthropologist; Author, Gaining Control - **Extract length:** 18 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Aunger's Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11061) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-062 — Mirsky's Law — Mark Jay Mirsky > As a corollary to that, the return of past time in the present, as death comes steadily closer, if not unique to the human mind, is certainly one of the consolations of consciousness, and of the shadow realm of dream. If there is hope it is in our ability as men and women to imagine ourselves not only in other worlds but as an "other," as an opposite. Robert Musil, Proust, Kafka, Shakespeare, Dante Alighieri together with the anonymous scribes of the religious epics, Gilgamesh, the Old Testament, were uncanny in their ability to imagine in this way. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** writer and founder and editor of Fiction Magazine - **Extract length:** 98 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [Mirsky's Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10766) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-063 — Davies' Law — Paul Davies > *No substantive textual extract was present in the aggregate archive entry.* - **Status:** `no_substantive_extract` - **Credentials:** Theoretical physicist; cosmologist; astro-biologist; co-Director of BEYOND, Arizona State University; principle investigator, Center for the Convergence of Physical Sciences and Cancer Biology; Author, The Eerie Silence and The Cosmic Jackpot - **Extract length:** 11 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Davies' Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10921) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-064 — Horgan's Law — John Horgan > Every garbage-removal system—whether Zen, skepticism, or existentialism—generates garbage. If you want to clear your mind, the best you can hope for is to find a system, or anti-system, that removes more garbage than it generates. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Director, Center for Science Writings, Stevens Institute of Technology - **Extract length:** 35 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [Horgan's Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11075) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-065 — Buss’s Laws of Human Mating — David M. Buss > For every mating adaptation in one sex, there exists at least one co-evolved adaptation in the other sex designed to manipulate and exploit it. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Psychology, University of Texas, Austin; Author, When Men Behave Badly - **Extract length:** 24 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Buss’s Laws of Human Mating](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10780) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-066 — Grand's Law — Steve Grand > Our brains may end up as a collection of highly specialised 'modules', but the functioning of these modules is not the key to intelligence. The key is the deeper set of rules that enable a homogeneous pink goo to wire itself up into such a collection of specialised machines in the first place, merely by being exposed to the sensory world. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Founder, Cyberlife Research; author, Creation: Life and How to Make It - **Extract length:** 61 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [Grand's Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10935) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-067 — Lloyd's Law — Seth Lloyd > The universe is a quantum computer: life, sex, the brain, and human society all arise out of the ability of the universe to process information at the level of atoms, photons and elementary particles. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Quantum Mechanical Engineering, MIT; Author, Programming the Universe - **Extract length:** 34 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `machine_intelligence`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Lloyd's Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11090) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-068 — Zangger's Law — Eberhard Zangger > • And when Johann Karl Fuhlrott discovered the bones of a Neanderthal in a cave near Duesseldorf in 1856, the president of the German Society of Anthropology considered it a bow-legged, Mongolian Cossack with rickets, who had been lucky enough to survive multiple head injuries, but who, during a campaign by Russian forces against France in 1814, had been wounded, and (stark naked) had crawled into a cave, where he died. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Managing director of science communications - **Extract length:** 71 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Zangger's Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10796) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-069 — Deutsch's Law — David Deutsch > In the long run, the distinction between what is interesting and what is boring is not a matter of subjective taste but an objective fact. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Physicist, University of Oxford; Author, The Beginning of Infinity; Recipient, Edge Computation Science Prize - **Extract length:** 25 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [Deutsch's Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10949) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-070 — Lanier's Law — Jaron Lanier > You can't have a categorical imperative without categories. Or, You can't have a golden rule without gold. You have to draw a Circle of Empathy around yourself and others in order to be moral. If you include too much in the circle, you become incompetent, while if you include too little you become cruel. This is the "Normal form" of the eternal liberal/conservative dichotomy. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Computer Scientist; Musician; Author, Who Owns The Future? - **Extract length:** 64 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Lanier's Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11104) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-071 — Maria's Law — Maria Spiropulu > A law at the time of its conception is the solution to a problem or the answer to a question; at that time both the solution and the problem, the question and the answer, are ill-posed. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Shang-Yi Ch’en Professor of Physics, California Institute of Technology; Founder, AQT/INQNET - **Extract length:** 36 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Maria's Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10810) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-072 — Brooks' Law — Rodney A. Brooks > A good place to apply scientific leverage is on an implicit assumption that everyone makes and that is so implicit that no one would even think to mention it to students entering the field. Negating that assumption may lead to new and interesting ways of thinking. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Panasonic Professor of Robotics (emeritus); Former Director, MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (1997-2007); Founder, CTO, Robust.AI; Author, Flesh and Machines - **Extract length:** 46 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Brooks' Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10963) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-073 — Seife's Law — Charles Seife > Each generation's scientific neologisms adorn the labels of the next generation's quack cures. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Journalism, New York University; Former Journalist, Science Magazine; Author, Hawking Hawking - **Extract length:** 13 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Seife's Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11119) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-074 — Barbour’s Law — Julian Barbour > My laws make more precise Carlo Rovelli’s two principles: time does not exist, space does not exist. He argues that the universe is a network of relations and not a game played out on some invisible arena of absolute space and time such as Newton postulated. I agree but believe it is important to formulate precisely the manner in which the universe is relational. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Theoretical physicist; Author, The Janus Point - **Extract length:** 64 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Barbour’s Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10823) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-075 — Marcus' Law — Gary Marcus > What's good enough for the body is good enough for the brain. Brains, like any other organ, take their special character from the actions of individual cells that divide, differentiate, migrate, and die, according to genetic programs that are the product of evolution. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Psychology, Director NYU Center for Language and Music; Author, Guitar Zero - **Extract length:** 43 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Marcus' Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10977) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-076 — Clark's Law — Andy Clark > There are no clear-cut level distinctions in nature. Neural software bleeds into neural firmware, neural firmware bleeds into neural hardware, psychology bleeds into biology and biology bleeds into physics. Body bleeds into mind and mind bleeds into world. Philosophy bleeds into science and science bleeds back.The idea of levels is a useful fiction, great for hygienic text-book writing and quick answers that defend our local turf but seldom advance scientific understanding). - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Cognitive Philosophy, Department of Philosophy and Department of Informatics, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK; Author, Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind - **Extract length:** 71 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [Clark's Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11133) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-077 — Nørretranders' Law — Tor Nørretranders > The difficulty in understanding new ideas originating from science or art is not intellectual, but emotional; good ideas are simple and clear, but if they are truly new, they will be hard to swallow. It is not difficult to understand that the Earth is not at the center of the Universe, but it is hard to believe it. Science is simple, simply strange. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Writer; Speaker; Thinker, Copenhagen, Denmark - **Extract length:** 63 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Nørretranders' Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10837) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-078 — Verena's Law — Verena Huber-Dyson > Verena's Law of Sane Reasoning Hone your Hunches, Jump, then backtrack to blaze a reliable trail to your Conclusion. But avoid reductions; they lead to mere counterfeits of truth. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** 1923-2016; Emeritus Professor, Formerly, Philosophy Department. University of Calgary, Alberta Canada - **Extract length:** 29 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Verena's Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10992) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-079 — Alda's Laws — Alan Alda > I've just been interviewing astronomers about dark matter and dark energy in the universe. These two things make up something like 96% of the universe. The part of the universe we can see or in some way observe is only about 4%. That leaves a lot of universe that needs to be rethought. And some people speculate that dark energy may be leaking in from a whole other universe; an even bigger change of frame, if that turns out to be the case. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Actor; Writer; Director; Host, PBS program Brains on Trial; Author, Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself - **Extract length:** 83 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Alda's Laws](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11148) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-080 — Campbell's Law — Philip Campbell > The probability that a Powerpoint presentation will fail is proportional to the technical sophistication of the institution at which you are presenting it. (And by the way, where the failure is total, your talk will be all the better for it.) - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Editor-in-Chief of Nature since 1995; Beginning summer 2018, he will become Editor-in-Chief of Springer Nature’s portfolio of journals, books and magazines - **Extract length:** 41 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Campbell's Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10851) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-081 — Sampson's Law of Interdependent Origination — Scott Sampson > Life's unfolding is a tapestry in which every new thread is contingent upon the nature, timing, and interweaving of virtually all previous threads. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** President & CEO, Science World British Columbia; Dinosaur paleontologist and science communicator; Author, How To Raise A Wild Child - **Extract length:** 23 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Sampson's Law of Interdependent Origination](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11006) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-082 — Anderson's Law — Christopher J. Anderson > Humans are engineered to seek for laws, whether or not they're actually there. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Curator, TED conferences, TED Talks; author, TED Talks - **Extract length:** 13 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Anderson's Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/11149) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-083 — Quartz's Law — Steven R. Quartz > Failure to alter thought, mood, personality, or other facets of ourselves through environmental means is not a demonstration that these are hard-wired. Rather, such failure should be taken merely as an indication that we have not yet discovered the appropriate regime of experience. New experience-based approaches to brain change are rapidly emerging, and overturn the dogma of the inflexible brain. We can now utilize the brain's latent capacity for change to treat mood disorders through experience-based brain change. Learning how to utilize the brain's latent plasticity, or capacity for change, will produce revolutions in physical, cognitive, and mental health remediation. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Neuroscientist; Professor of Philosophy, Caltech; Co-author, Cool - **Extract length:** 100 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [Quartz's Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10865) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-084 — Golomb 's Law — Beatrice Golomb > Everything in biology is more complicated than you think it is, even taking into account Golomb's Law. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Medicine at UCSD - **Extract length:** 17 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Golomb 's Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10280) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-085 — Kai's Existential Dilemma — Kai Krause > *No substantive textual extract was present in the aggregate archive entry.* - **Status:** `no_substantive_extract` - **Credentials:** Software Pioneer; Philosopher; Author, A Realtime Literature Explorer - **Extract length:** 4 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Kai's Existential Dilemma](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10576) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-086 — Ryan's Law — Paul Ryan > Once the mind is freed to think positionally without orientation, a logic of relationships naturally ensues. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Author of Cybernetics of the Sacred) and Video Mind, Earth Mind - **Extract length:** 16 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [Ryan's Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10355) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-087 — Zeilinger's Law — Anton Zeilinger > *No substantive textual extract was present in the aggregate archive entry.* - **Status:** `no_substantive_extract` - **Credentials:** Nobel laureate (2022 - Physics); Physicist, University of Vienna; Scientific Director, Institute of Quantum Optics and Quantum Information; President, Austrian Academy of Sciences; Author, Dance of the Photons: From Einstein to Quantum Teleportation - **Extract length:** 10 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Zeilinger's Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10723) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-088 — Sheldrake's Principle — Rupert Sheldrake > Vision involves a movement of light into the eyes, changes in the brain, and the outward projection of images to where they seem to be. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** biologist and author - **Extract length:** 25 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [Sheldrake's Principle](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10465) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-089 — Pickover 's Law of Mutating Conjectures — Clifford Pickover > I am having difficulty formulating a law to give you. Through the millennia, even the most brilliant minds rarely generated great and profound "laws." Probably every "law" ever made had been broken or will crumble after a time. Perhaps Edge is asking the wrong question. Knowledge moves in an ever-expanding, upward-pointing funnel. From the rim, we look down and see previous knowledge from a new perspective as new theories are formed. Today's conjectures mutate, new theories evolve, and yesterday's impossibilities become part of everyday life. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Author, The Math Book, The Physics Book, and The Medical Book trilogy - **Extract length:** 85 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Pickover 's Law of Mutating Conjectures](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10287) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-090 — Bly's Law — Adam Bly > High public interest in science without growing public understanding of science is worse than low public interest in science. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Head of Advanced Analytics, Spotify - **Extract length:** 19 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Bly's Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10588) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-091 — Levy's Law — Steven Levy > In journalism, this means that the best practitioners should not have the stories written out in their heads before they report them. Preconceptions can blind you to the full, rich human reality that awaits you when you actually listen to your subjects and approach the material with an open mind. It wouldn't surprise me if the same tabula rasa principle applies when scientists try to answer the big questions. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Senior Editor for Newsweek - **Extract length:** 69 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [Levy's Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10363) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-092 — Etcoff's Law — Nancy Etcoff > Approach them with caution, the way demolition experts regard bombs, likely to explode, in this case into unproductive argument and the obscuring of truth. "Opposing forces" are the scientific version of the original dualism—good vs evil and darkness vs. light. Instead, of acting in opposition, in nature two forces are likely to dependent, interactive and interwoven; sometimes they are merely two names for the same thing. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Psychologist and faculty member of the Harvard Medical School and of Harvard University - **Extract length:** 66 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Etcoff's Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10738) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-093 — Winer's Law of the Internet — Dave Winer > Think about the process of arriving at a standard. Someone goes first with something new. Assume it catches on and becomes popular. Because the person did it in an open way, with no patents, or other barriers to competitors using the technology, a second developer decides to do the same thing. The innovator supports this, because he or she wants a standard to develop. At that point the second person has the power to decide how strong a standard it will be. If the new implementation strives to work exactly as the original does, then it's more likely the standard will be strong, and there will be a vibrant market around it. But if the second party decides to use the concept but not be technically compatible, it will be a weak standard. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Blogging and RSS Software Pioneer; Editor, Scripting News Weblog - **Extract length:** 133 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Winer's Law of the Internet](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10476) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-094 — Morgan's Law — Howard Lee Morgan > Events of probability zero happen—they are the ones that change the world. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Vice Chairman of idealab! the Pasadena - **Extract length:** 12 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Morgan's Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10294) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-095 — Kurzweil's Law (aka Law of Accelerating Returns) — Ray Kurzweil > • One resource is the (ever-growing) order of the evolutionary process itself. Each stage of evolution provides more powerful tools for the next. In biological evolution, the advent of DNA allowed more powerful and faster evolutionary "experiments." Later, setting the "designs" of animal body plans during the Cambrian explosion allowed rapid evolutionary development of other body organs, such as the brain. Or to take a more recent example, the advent of computer-assisted design tools allows rapid development of the next generation of computers. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Principal Developer of the first omni-font optical character recognition - **Extract length:** 83 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `machine_intelligence`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Kurzweil's Law (aka Law of Accelerating Returns)](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10600) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-096 — Gershenfeld's Law on Research — Neil Gershenfeld > "Form follows function" implies that they're separable; the most profound scientific and technological insights that I know follow from abstracting logical functions from physical forms. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Physicist, Director, MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms; Co-author, Designing Reality - **Extract length:** 25 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Gershenfeld's Law on Research](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10372) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-097 — Smolin's Law — Lee Smolin > A measure of our ignorance about nature is the extent to which our theories depend on background structures, which are entities necessary to define the quantities in the theory, that do not themselves refer to anything which evolves dynamically in time. Our understanding can always be deepened by bringing such fixed, background structures into the domain of dynamical law. By doing so, we convert absolute properties, defined with respect to background structures, into relational properties, defined in terms of relationships among dynamical degrees of freedom. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Physicist, Perimeter Institute; Author, Einstein's Unfinished Revolution - **Extract length:** 85 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Smolin's Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10752) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-098 — Aizu's Law — Izumi Aizu > We are living in a world where we can exchange ideas and emotions freely and inexpensively, the first time in the history. Information piled up, or disseminated one way down, never makes people happy or feel compelled to act that much, while communication, just a single line or word from your friends or beloved, or even from a total stranger, that catches your heart, often results in collective actions. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Executive Director, Institute for HyperNetwork Society; Senior Research Fellow & Professor, Institute for InfoSocinomics, Tama University, Japan - **Extract length:** 69 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Aizu's Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10487) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-099 — Seckel's Law — Al Seckel > In fact, our visual system is so successful at building an accurate representation of the real world (our perception) that most of us do not realize what a difficult task our brain is performing. Without conscious thought, our visual system gathers and interprets complex information, providing us with a seamless perception of our environment. The complexities of how we perceive are cleverly concealed by a successful visual system. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Cognitive neuroscientist; Author, Optical Illusions: The Science of Visual Perception - **Extract length:** 68 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Seckel's Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10301) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-100 — Bharucha's Law — Jamshed Bharucha > To understand what people are thinking and feeling, look beyond what they say. Language does not capture the full range and grain of thought and experience, and its unique power enables us as easily to mask our thoughts and feelings as it does to express them. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Psychologist; President Emeritus, Cooper Union - **Extract length:** 46 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Bharucha's Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10613) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-101 — Segre’s Law — Gino Segre > One has to keep looking for a theory that will explain the numbers. Our galaxy has a hundred billion stars and our brain has a hundred billion neurons. Understanding our galaxy and our brain are great challenges, but two different theories are required. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Physics & Astronomy, University of Pennsylvania; Author, The Pope of Physics: Enrico Fermi and the Birth of the Atomic Age - **Extract length:** 43 words - **Trajectory signals:** `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [Segre’s Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10381) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-102 — Nesse’s Laws for deciding when it is safe to use drugs to block evolved protective responses. — Randolph Nesse > An optimal mechanism to regulate an all-or-none defensive response such as vomiting or panic will express the response whenever CD< ∑(pH x CH w/o defense) –∑(pH x CH w/defense). That is, expressing a defense is worth it whenever the cost of the defense (CD) is less than the estimated reduction in harm, based the probability (pH) and cost of various harmful outcomes (CH) with and without the expression of the defense. This means that optimal systems that regulate inexpensive defenses against large somewhat unpredictable potential harms will express many false alarms and that blocking these unnecessary responses can (and does) greatly relieve human suffering. Blocking responses yields a net benefit, however, only if we can anticipate when a normal response is likely to be essential to prevent catastrophe. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Research Professor of Life Sciences, Director (2014-2019), Center for Evolution and Medicine, Arizona State University; Author, Good Reasons for Bad Feelings - **Extract length:** 128 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Nesse’s Laws for deciding when it is safe to use drugs to block evolved protective responses.](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10498) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-103 — Rucker's Law of Morphogenesis — Rudy Rucker > Most biological, social, and psychological systems are based on interactions between an activator and an inhibitor. The patterns which emerge depend upon the relative rates at which the activator and inhibitor spread. Three main cases occur, depending on whether the activator's diffusion rate is much less than, roughly equal to, or greater than the rate at which the inhibition spreads. In these three cases we observe, respectively, isolated patches like zebra stripes or leopard spots, moving complex patterns like Belusov-Zhabontinsky scrolls, or seething chaos. Applying this to the activator-inhibitor patterns in the human brain, if you inhibit new thoughts, you are left with a few highly stimulated patches: obsessions and fixed ideas. If you manage to create new thought associations at about the same rate you inhibit them, you develop creative complexity. And too high a rate of activation leads to unproductive mania. Exercise: apply this notion to spread of good and bad news in society. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Mathematician; Computer Scientist; Cyberpunk Pioneer; Novelist, Infinity and the Mind, Postsingular, and (with Bruce Sterling) Transreal Cyberpunk. - **Extract length:** 156 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [Rucker's Law of Morphogenesis](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10303) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-104 — Barondes' Law — Samuel Barondes > Self-understanding is inherently inaccurate because most of our knowledge comes from specific behavioral experiences that are often inconsistent; and our mechanisms of learning are designed to store memories whether or or not their implications are formally contradictory. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Neurobiology and Psychiatry, UCSF; Author, Making Sense of People - **Extract length:** 37 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `memory_and_persistence`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Barondes' Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10625) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-105 — Warwick's Law — Henry Warwick > Art, at its best, takes you out of your town, your home, your living room, your armchair, your mind, and brings you some place—a destination, a wonderful place, a new way of looking at things, a deep shift in your understanding of what it means to be human with a sense of profundity and awe at the Creation, pointing toward a new and better environment for living, smiling a new smile—all by altering your consciousness in some useful and insightful way. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** artist, composer, and scientist - **Extract length:** 81 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [Warwick's Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10390) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-106 — Sapolsky's Three Laws for Doing Science — Robert Sapolsky > Often, the biggest impediment to scientific progress is not what we don't know, but what we know. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Neuroscientist, Stanford University; Author, Behave - **Extract length:** 17 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Sapolsky's Three Laws for Doing Science](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10509) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-107 — Delta's Law — Delta Willis > The Greek letter delta is a symbol for change in formulas. This triangle can be taken personally to create a philosophy that can be used as laws. For example, the 3 points of a triangle create a possibility space for change. Two points in a debate provide nothing more than a tyranny of dichotomies, whereas adding a third possibility is always more interesting, and closer to the true complexity of life. This rule of favoring 3s instead of 2s also works in any design to please the eye, such as three pictures on a wall instead of two. A couple become more interesting when they go beyond their own twosome to create a third focal point, whether a child, a book or a business. As Yale paleontologist Dolf Seilacher put it, Symmetry is boring. The next time you are confronted with only two choices, create a third, and see the possibility space expand. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Paleontologist; Author, Hominid Gang - **Extract length:** 153 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Delta's Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10311) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-108 — Arthur's Law — W. Brian Arthur > We are leaving an age of mechanistic, fixed-design technologies, and entering an age of metabolic, self-reorganizing technologies. In this sense, as technology becomes more advanced it becomes more organic—therefore more "biological." Further, as biological mechanisms at the cellular and DNA levels become better understood, they become harnessed and co-opted as technologies. In this century, biology and technology will therefore intertwine. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** External Professor, Santa Fe Institute; Visiting Researcher, Intelligent Systems Lab, PARC; Inaugural Recipient, Lagrange Prize; Author, The Nature of Technology - **Extract length:** 60 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [Arthur's Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10639) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-109 — Baron-Cohen's Law of Sex differences in the Mind — Simon Baron-Cohen > In any random population, of those who score in the above-average range on tests of empathizing, females will significantly outnumber males. And of those who score in the above-average range on tests of systemizing, males will significantly outnumber females. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Developmental Psychopathology, University of Cambridge; Fellow, Trinity College, Cambridge; Director, Autism Research Centre, Cambridge; Author, The Pattern Seekers - **Extract length:** 39 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [Baron-Cohen's Law of Sex differences in the Mind](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10399) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-110 — Holton's Law — Gerald Holton > The turning points in individual and national life are most probably guided by probabilism. (Examples: You are one of about a billion possible yous, since only one spermatozoon [or sometimes two] make it to the ovum, out of about a billion different competitors, none the same. Or on the national/ international scale, the availability of a Churchill in 1940.) - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics and Professor of the History of Science, Emeritus, Harvard University; Author, Einstein for the 21st Century: His Legacy in Science, Art, and Modern Culture - **Extract length:** 59 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Holton's Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10520) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-111 — Steinhardt's Law — Paul J. Steinhardt > (Exercise left for the reader—fill in the blank. For hint, see Steinhardt's Law.) - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Albert Einstein Professor in Science, Departments of Physics and Astrophysical Sciences, Princeton University; Coauthor, Endless Universe - **Extract length:** 13 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Steinhardt's Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10318) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-112 — Dennett's Law of Needy Readers — Daniel C. Dennett > On any important topic, we tend to have a dim idea of what we hope to be true, and when an author writes the words we want to read, we tend to fall for it, no matter how shoddy the arguments. Needy readers have an asymptote at illiteracy; if a text doesn't say the one thing they need to read, it might as well be in a foreign language. To be open-minded, you have to recognize, and counteract, your own doxastic hungers. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Philosopher; Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy, Co-Director, Center for Cognitive Studies, Tufts University; Author, From Bacteria to Bach and Back - **Extract length:** 82 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Dennett's Law of Needy Readers](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10654) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-113 — Finn's Law — Christine Finn > Does not the palpable quiver preceding the sudden rush of certainty give that final kick to real innovation? - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Archaeologist; Journalist; Author, Artifacts, Past Poetic - **Extract length:** 18 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Finn's Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10408) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-114 — Diffrient's Law — Niels Diffrient > The improvements derived from technological advances have an equal and opposite effect on culture and the environment magnified by time and scale. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Industrial designer - **Extract length:** 22 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Diffrient's Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10531) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-115 — Punset's Law — Eduardo Punset > The brain is very good at managing automated, unconscious processes such as breathing, digesting or transpiring. But so far neuroscience has not produced the slightest evidence that flipping a coin to decide on important matters such as marriage, taking up a job, or traveling is any worst than a formal, conscious, discriminatory decision made by the brain. This should not surprise anybody. If we leave aside the individual brain, and look at the evolution of social primates as a whole, few would question that the history of civilization equals the history of successive and cumulative automatization in fields such as agriculture, industry or information. Why should it be different for the individual brain? - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Scientist; Spanish Television Presenter; Author, The Happiness Trip - **Extract length:** 113 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [Punset's Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10325) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-116 — Ridley's Law — Matt Ridley > Experience affects an organism largely by switching genes on and off. (Nurture works through nature.) - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Science Writer; Fellow, Royal Society of Literature and the Academy of Medical Sciences; Author,The Evolution of Everything - **Extract length:** 15 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [Ridley's Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10668) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-117 — Susskind's Rule of Thumb — Leonard Susskind > I saw exactly the same phenomenon more recently when I was working on black holes. This time it was after a string theory seminar, I think in Santa Barbara. I asked the audience to vote whether they agreed with me and Gerard 't Hooft or if they thought Hawkings ideas were correct. This time I got a 50-50 response. By this time I knew what was going on so I wasn't so surprised. Anyway I later asked if anyone was working on Hawking's theory of information loss. Not a single hand went up. Don't ask what they think. Ask what they do. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Felix Bloch Professor in Theoretical Physics, Stanford; Author, The Theoretical Minimum series - **Extract length:** 102 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Susskind's Rule of Thumb](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10417) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-118 — Kleiner's Law — Art Kleiner > Every organization always operates on behalf of the perceived needs and priorities of some core group of key people. This purpose will trump every other organizational loyalty, including those to shareholders, employees, customers, and other constituents. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** co-author (with Pete Senge et al.) of the best-selling Fifth Discipline Fieldbook, The Dance of Change, and Schools That Learn; and author of Who Really Matters: The Core Group Theory of Power, Priviledge, and Success - **Extract length:** 36 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Kleiner's Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10259) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-119 — Kauffman's Law — Stuart A. Kauffman > The adjacent possible, for a chemical reaction graph, is the set of novel molecules that can be created out of those existing now. The biosphere has advanced into the chemical adjacent possible over the history of life.The issue is, are there laws that govern this advance? And so too for technology. I'm very unsure about my candidate law, but at least it points to the reality that we do advance into the adjacent possible and perhaps some law governs how we do so. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Biological Sciences, Physics, Astronomy, University of Calgary; Author, Reinventing the Sacred - **Extract length:** 83 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Kauffman's Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10542) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-120 — Sejnowski's Law — Terrence J. Sejnowski > For every important function that a cell needs to carry out Nature has created a gadget to make it more efficient. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Computational Neuroscientist; Francis Crick Professor, the Salk Institute; Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute; Co-author (with Patricia Churchland), The Computational Brain - **Extract length:** 21 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Sejnowski's Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10332) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-121 — Harari’s Law of Science Education — Haim Harari > Every scientific discovery is first made by one person or by a few people. At the time of the discovery, they are the only ones aware of it. It follows logically that democratic votes, public opinion polls, majority views of scientists and scientific fads do not necessarily represent scientific truth. Only correct experimental results do. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Physicist, former President, Weizmann Institute of Science; Author, A View from the Eye of the Storm - **Extract length:** 55 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Harari’s Law of Science Education](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10682) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-122 — Turkle's Law of Evocative Objects — Sherry Turkle > The human has evolved to anthropomorphize. We are on the brink of creating machines so "sociable" in appearance that they will push our evolutionary buttons to treat them as kindred. Yet they will not have shared our human biological and social experience and will thus not have our means of access to the meanings of moments in the human life cycle: a child's first step, an adolescent's strut, a parent's pride. Yet we will not be in complete control of our feelings for these objects because our feelings will not be based on what they know or understand, but on what we "experience" them as knowing, a very different thing. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology, MIT; Internet Culture Researcher; Author, The Empathy Diaries - **Extract length:** 110 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `machine_intelligence`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Turkle's Law of Evocative Objects](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10426) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-123 — Hurst's Law — Mark Hurst > Bits are so easy to create, copy, and send that without some filtering process, the worth of the entire bitstream decays rapidly. A good example is the e-mail inbox. Many e-mail users have no discipline about deleting or filtering their mail, and thus the bits that flow in—spam and legitimate mail together—clutter the inbox to an extent that the worth of the inbox overall tends to zero. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Founder of Internet consulting firm Creative Good - **Extract length:** 67 words - **Trajectory signals:** `memory_and_persistence` - **Source:** [Hurst's Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10266) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-124 — Pollack's Law — Jordan Pollack > Consider a black box that takes in energy and produces bit-strings. The complexity of a bit-string is not simply its length, because a long string of all 1's or all 0's is quite simple. Kolmogorov measures complexity by the size of the smallest program listing that can generate a string, and Bennet's Logical Depth also accounts for the cost of running the program. But these fail on the Mandelbrot Set, a very beautiful set of patterns arising from a one-line program listing. What of life itself, the result of a simple non-equilibrium chemical process baking for quite a long time? Different algorithmic processes (including fractals, natural evolution, and the human mind) "create" by operating as a "Platonic Scoop," instantiating "ideals" into physical arrangements or memory states. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor and Chairman of Computer Science, Brandeis University - **Extract length:** 126 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `memory_and_persistence`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Pollack's Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10553) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-125 — Chalupa's Law — Leo M. Chalupa > Another key for success in science...if you're too far ahead of the herd (with very few exception) you're not going to get funded by NIH/NSF or published in the premier journals. This is in spite of the fact that they claim that they fund innovative research. Anyone who has spend as much time on grant review committees as I have will recognize the power of this rule. In other words, there is a price to pay for originality and every working scientist knows this is the case. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Neurobiologist; Professor of Pharmacology and Physiology, George Washington University - **Extract length:** 87 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Chalupa's Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10339) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-126 — Lakoff's Law — George Lakoff > All of our concepts are organized into conceptual structures called "frames" (which may include images and metaphors) and all words are defined relative to those frames. Conventional frames are pretty much fixed in the neural structures of our brains. In order for a fact to be comprehended, it must fit the relevant frames. If the facts contradict the frames, the frames, being fixed in the brain, will be kept and the facts ignored. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Fellow at The Rockridge Institute; Author, The Little Blue Book - **Extract length:** 73 words - **Trajectory signals:** `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [Lakoff's Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10696) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-127 — Harris's Law — Judith Rich Harris > Good things go together. Miller's Iron Law of Iniquity—" in practice, every good trait correlates positively with every other good trait"—is true, and follows from Harris's First Law. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Independent Investigator and Theoretician; Author, The Nurture Assumption; No Two Alike: Human Nature and Human Individuality - **Extract length:** 28 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Harris's Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10444) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-128 — Drexler's Law — K. Eric Drexler > A technology approaching the limits set by physical law must build with atomic precision. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Researcher; Policy Advocate; Author, Engines of Creation - **Extract length:** 14 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Drexler's Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10273) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-129 — Evans' laws of the completeness of good old fashioned AI. — Dylan Evans > When the Turing-machine that describes the mind of intelligent agent has been specified, there is nothing more to say about that mind, apart from how it is implemented in hardware. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Founder and CEO of Projection Point; Author, The Utopia Experiment - **Extract length:** 30 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [Evans' laws of the completeness of good old fashioned AI.](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10564) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-130 — Hameroff's Law — Stuart Hameroff > The vast majority of brain activity is non-conscious; consciousness is "the tip of an iceberg" of neural activity. Yet the threshold for transition from pre-, non-, or sub-conscious processes into conscious awareness is unknown. The sub-conscious mind as revealed in dreams has been described by Matte Blanco as a place where "paradox reigns, and opposites merge to sameness". Reality is seemingly described by two separate sets of laws. In our everyday classical world, Newton's laws and Maxwell's equations accurately portray reality. However at small scales, the bizarre laws of quantum mechanics rule: particles are distorted in space and time (uncertainty), exist in multiple states or locations simultaneously (superposition) and remain connected in opposite states over distance (nonlocal entanglement). In the quantum world "paradox reigns and opposites merge to sameness". - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor, Anesthesiology and Psychology Associate Director, Center for Consciousness Studies The University of Arizona Tucson, Arizona - **Extract length:** 129 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Hameroff's Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10347) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-131 — Laumann's Proposition — Edward O. Laumann > These propositions (they are empirical associations and not established as causal) are based on my extensive international work on human sexuality. They are based on surveys I have conducted in the United States and China as well as the Pfizer-funded Global Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Behavior (N = 27,500) which interviewed equal numbers of men and women 40 to 80 years old in 29 countries world wide. The real question is the nature of the causal link between these variables. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Distinguished Service Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago - **Extract length:** 81 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Laumann's Proposition](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10709) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-132 — Amato's Law of Awe — Ivan Amato > Transcending our own sensory limitations with technological tools of observation, a relentless theme of the history of science, enhances the experience of awe itself because it expands the variety of attributes of the universe that we can know about. Therein lies one of the most underrated values of science. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Freelance print and radio Writer; Editor of the Pathways of Discovery essay series for Science Magazine - **Extract length:** 49 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Amato's Law of Awe](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10455) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-133 — Rennie's Law of Credibility — John Rennie > The most important environmental influences on any organism are always the other organisms around it. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Editor-In-Chief, Scientific American - **Extract length:** 15 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [Rennie's Law of Credibility](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10069) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-134 — Snyder's Law — Allan Snyder > Everyone steals ideas from everyone else, but they do so unconsciously. This has evolved for our very survival. It maximizes the innovative power of society. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Director of The Centre for the Minds - **Extract length:** 25 words - **Trajectory signals:** `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Snyder's Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10133) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-135 — Berreby's Law — David Berreby > To put it more cynically, if your work lets people believe there are "Jewish genes'" (never mind that the same genes are found in Palestinians) or that criminals have different kinds of brains from regular people (never mind that regular people get arrested all the time), or that your ancestors 5,000 years ago lived in the same neck of the woods as you (never mind the whereabouts of all your other ancestors), well then, good press will be yours. On the other hand, if your work shows how thoroughly perceptions of race, ethnicity, and other traits change with circumstances, well, good luck. Common sense will defend itself against science. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Journalist; Author, Us and Them - **Extract length:** 109 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [Berreby's Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10209) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-136 — Simonyi's Law of Guaranteed Evolution — Charles Simonyi > *No substantive textual extract was present in the aggregate archive entry.* - **Status:** `no_substantive_extract` - **Credentials:** Software Engineer, Computer Scientist, Entrepreneur, Philanthropist - **Extract length:** 9 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Simonyi's Law of Guaranteed Evolution](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10075) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-137 — Benford's Modified Clarke Law — Gregory Benford > *No substantive textual extract was present in the aggregate archive entry.* - **Status:** `no_substantive_extract` - **Credentials:** Emeritus Professor of Physics and Astronomy, UC-Irvine; Novelist, The Berlin Project - **Extract length:** 10 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Benford's Modified Clarke Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10140) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-138 — Lohr's Law — Steve Lohr > *No substantive textual extract was present in the aggregate archive entry.* - **Status:** `no_substantive_extract` - **Credentials:** Senior Writer and Technology Reporter, The New York Times; Author, Data-ism - **Extract length:** 11 words - **Trajectory signals:** `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Lohr's Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10217) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-139 — Ewald's Law — Paul W. Ewald > The defining characteristic of science—the one that gives sciences its extraordinary explanatory power—is the objective use of evidence to distinguish between alternative guesses. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Biology, Amherst College; Author, Plague Time - **Extract length:** 23 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models`, `governance_control_and_values` - **Source:** [Ewald's Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10080) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-140 — Randall's Law — Lisa Randall > Non-existence "theorems", which state something cannot happen, are untrustworthy; they are only statements about what we have seen or thought of so far. Non-existence theorems often appear in physics. They are useful guidelines, but there are often loopholes. Sometimes you find those loopholes by looking—and sometimes you find them by accident through superficially unrelated research - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Physicist, Harvard University; Author, Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs - **Extract length:** 55 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Randall's Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10147) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-141 — Gigerenzer's Law of Indispensable Ignorance — Gerd Gigerenzer > We can prove that situations exist in which a group does best by following its most ignorant member rather than the consensus of their informed majority, and we can prove that a heuristic that ignores all information except for one reason will make better predictions than a multiple regression with a dozen reasons. Mnemonists, who have virtually unlimited memory, are swamped by details and find it difficult to abstract and reason, while ordinary people's working memory limitations maximize the ability to detect correlations in the world. Limited memory facilitates acquisition of language, in infants and computers alike; the more complex the species, the longer the period of infancy. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Psychologist; Director, Harding Center for Risk Literacy, Max Planck Institute for Human Development; Author, How to Stay Smart in a Smart World - **Extract length:** 108 words - **Trajectory signals:** `memory_and_persistence`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Gigerenzer's Law of Indispensable Ignorance](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10224) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-142 — Cronin's law of dual information storage — Helena Cronin > The Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdos used to describe himself as a "machine for turning coffee into theorems". In much the same way, genes are machines for turning stars into a bird's compass; carotenoids into males of dazzling beauty; smells into love-potions; facial muscles into signals of friendship; a glance into uncertainty of paternity; and oxygen, water, light, zinc, calcium and iron into bears, beetles, bacteria or bluebells. More strictly, genes are machines for turning stars into birds and thereby into more genes. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Co-director of LSE's Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science; Author, The Ant and the Peacock: Altruism and Sexual Selection from Darwin to Today - **Extract length:** 82 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence`, `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Cronin's law of dual information storage](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10085) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-143 — Pinker's Law — Steven Pinker > Human intelligence is a product of analogy and combinatorics. Analogy allows the mind to use a few innate ideas—space, force, essence, goal—to understand more abstract domains. Combinatorics allows an a finite set of simple ideas to give rise to an infinite set of complex ones. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Johnstone Family Professor, Department of Psychology; Harvard University; Author, Rationality - **Extract length:** 45 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `machine_intelligence`, `successor_intelligence_and_civilization` - **Source:** [Pinker's Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10152) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-144 — Markoff's Law of Inversion — John Markoff > Technology once trickled down from supercomputers to PCs. Now new computing technology comes to game machines first. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Pulitzer Prize-winning Reporter, The New York Times; Author, Whole Earth - **Extract length:** 17 words - **Trajectory signals:** `machine_intelligence` - **Source:** [Markoff's Law of Inversion](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10231) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-145 — Damasio's Law — Antonio Damasio > *No substantive textual extract was present in the aggregate archive entry.* - **Status:** `no_substantive_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Psychology and Neurology, David Dornsife Chair in Neuroscience, USC Dornsife - **Extract length:** 5 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity`, `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [Damasio's Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10091) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-146 — Hearst's Law — Marti Hearst > A public figure is often condemned for an action that is taken unfairly out of context but nevertheless reflects, in a compelling and encapsulated manner, an underlying truth about that person. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Computer Scientist, UC Berkeley, School of Information; Author, Search User Interfaces - **Extract length:** 31 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Hearst's Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10160) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-147 — Rees's Law — Martin Rees > The part of the universe astronomers can observe is probably only a tiny part of the aftermath of 'our' big bang, which in turn may be one of an infinity of 'bangs' in which the physics may be very different from in ours. To analyze how our own cosmic habitat relates to this ensemble, we'll need to draw on concepts from ecology and evolutionary biology ('fitness landscapes', etc). - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Former President, The Royal Society; Emeritus Professor of Cosmology & Astrophysics, University of Cambridge; Fellow, Trinity College; Author, From Here to Infinity - **Extract length:** 68 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Rees's Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10238) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-148 — Eno's Law — Brian Eno > Science wants to know what can be said about the world, what can be predicted about it. Art likes to see which other worlds are possible, to see how it would feel if it were this way instead of that way. As such art can give us the practice and agility to think and experience in new ways - preparing us for the new understandings of things that science supplies. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Artist; Composer; Recording Producer: U2, Coldplay, Talking Heads, Paul Simon; Recording Artist - **Extract length:** 70 words - **Trajectory signals:** `consciousness_and_identity` - **Source:** [Eno's Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10097) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-149 — Hillis' Law — W. Daniel Hillis > Dollars become more important than gold. The brand becomes more important than the company. The painting becomes more important than the landscape. The new medium (which begins as a representation of the old medium) eclipses the old. The prize becomes more important than the achievement. The genes become more important than the organism. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Physicist, Computer Scientist, Co-Founder, Applied Invention.; Author, The Pattern on the Stone - **Extract length:** 53 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting` - **Source:** [Hillis' Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10167) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-150 — Humphrey's Law of the Efficacy of Prayer — Nicholas Humphrey > In a dangerous world there will always be more people around whose prayers for their own safety have been answered than those whose prayers have not. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Emeritus Professor of Psychology, London School of Economics; Visiting Professor of Philosophy, New College of the Humanities; Senior Member, Darwin College, Cambridge; Author, Soul Dust - **Extract length:** 26 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Humphrey's Law of the Efficacy of Prayer](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10245) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-151 — Raymond's Law of Software — Eric S. Raymond > The first one is sometimes called "Raymond's Law" now, though I originally called it "Linus's Law" when I formulated it. Second one. Hmmm. Several people have since invented this one independently, but I came up with it more than twenty years ago. It's a reply to Arthur C. Clarke's Third Law, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Observer-participant anthropologist in the Internet hacker culture - **Extract length:** 59 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Raymond's Law of Software](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10103) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-152 — Gelernter's Law — David Gelernter > One expert is worth a million intellectuals. (This law is only approximate.) - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Computer Scientist, Yale University; Chief Scientist, Mirror Worlds Technologies; Author, America-Lite: How Imperial Academia Dismantled our Culture (and ushered in the Obamacrats) - **Extract length:** 12 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Gelernter's Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10174) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-153 — Vardi's Law — Joseph "Yossi" Vardi > 1. A certain portion of all predictions made by experts will be correct. 2. Human memory is short. 3. Make lot of forecasts, most of the people will remember the correct ones. 4. A good hedge: make contradictory predictions with intervals between them. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** chairman of International Technologies - **Extract length:** 43 words - **Trajectory signals:** `memory_and_persistence` - **Source:** [Vardi's Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10252) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-154 — Kreye's Law of Literalism — Andrian Kreye > Literalism can become an exhausting effort to defend the principles of fact and reason in a polarized world. The complex and often boring nature of factual reality makes it an unglamorous voice amid a choir of sparkling witticisms and provocations. Devoid of the ecstasies and spiritual cushioning of religion it denies age old longings. It can be decried as heresy or simultaneously accused of treason by all sides. It must sustain the insecurities brought on by the absence of ultimate truth. Having been the gravitational center of enlightenment, it must be defended as the last resort of reason. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Editor-at-large of the German Daily Newspaper, Sueddeutsche Zeitung, Munich - **Extract length:** 98 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Kreye's Law of Literalism](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10109) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-155 — Barabási's Law of Programming — Albert-lászló Barabási > Program development ends when the program does what you expect it to do—whether it is correct or not. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Complex Network Scientist; Distinguished Professor and Director of Northeastern University's Center for Complex Network Research; Author, Bursts: The Hidden Pattern Behind Everything We Do - **Extract length:** 18 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Barabási's Law of Programming](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10181) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-156 — Tipler's Law of Unlimited Progress — Frank Tipler > The laws of physics place no limits on progress, be it scientific, economic, cultural, or intellectual. In fact, the laws of physics require the knowledge and wealth possessed by intelligent beings in the universe to increase without limit, this knowledge and wealth becoming literally infinite by the the end of time. Intelligent life forms must inevitably expand out from their planets of origin, and convert the entire universe into a biosphere. If the laws of physics be for us, who can be against us? - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Professor of Mathematical Physics, Tulane University; Coauthor (with John Barrow), The Anthropic Cosmological Principle - **Extract length:** 84 words - **Trajectory signals:** `epistemic_limits_and_models` - **Source:** [Tipler's Law of Unlimited Progress](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10115) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-157 — Lippincott's Law — Sara Lippincott > God is evolving. So if you're an atheist, you'd better hope that the arrow of time only goes in one direction. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Freelance editor of books on science - **Extract length:** 21 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Lippincott's Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10188) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-158 — Sperber's Shudder — Dan Sperber > Thanks for the invitation, but this time I will pass: I am too much of an anarchist: the only laws I like are scientific ones, and the idea of some normative statement being labeled, even if just for fun, "Sperber's Law", makes me shudder. Sorry! (But I will enjoy reading the "laws" of other people). - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Social and Cognitive Scientist; CEU Budapest and CNRS Paris; Co-author (with Deirdre Wilson), Meaning and Relevance; and (with Hugo Mercier), The Enigma of Reason - **Extract length:** 55 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Sperber's Shudder](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10121) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-159 — Overbye's Law — Dennis Overbye > *No substantive textual extract was present in the aggregate archive entry.* - **Status:** `no_substantive_extract` - **Credentials:** Deputy Science Editor of The New York Times - **Extract length:** 5 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Overbye's Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10195) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-160 — Anderson's Law (of the Experienced Science Journalist) — Alun Anderson > The bigger the brain, the better the stories it fabricates for us. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Senior Consultant (and former Editor-in-Chief and Publishing Director), New Scientist; Author, After the Ice - **Extract length:** 12 words - **Trajectory signals:** `biological_and_synthetic_hosting`, `neural_interfaces_and_augmentation` - **Source:** [Anderson's Law (of the Experienced Science Journalist)](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10064) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-161 — Godwin 's Law — Mike Godwin > As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Contributing Editor at Reason - **Extract length:** 17 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Godwin 's Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10127) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted ### EDGE2004-162 — Poundstone's Law — William Poundstone > Independent discoverers of great ideas emerge in proportion to the time spent looking for them. The history of science is a fractal, with co-discoverers emerging like crinkles in the Norwegian coastline. - **Status:** `archived_exact_extract` - **Credentials:** Journalist; Author, How Do You Fight a Horse-Sized Duck?: Secrets to Succeeding at Interview Mind Games and Getting the Job You Want; Nominated twice for the Pulitzer Prize - **Extract length:** 31 words - **Trajectory signals:** `general_scientific_culture` - **Source:** [Poundstone's Law](https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10202) - **Reminder status:** Not yet promoted