Ming the Mechanic
The NewsLog of Flemming Funch

Wednesday, April 7, 2004day link 

 Laws
picture Via Dave Pollard. Edge asked a bunch of smart people for their personal laws. You know along the lines of Murphy's Law, Moore's Law, Metcalfe's Law and that kind of thing. Answers are here. These are some of my favorites:
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.

Stuart Hameroff:The sub-conscious mind is to consciousness what the quantum world is to the classical world.

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.

Steven Levy: The truth is always more interesting that your preconception of what it might be.

Matt Ridley: Science is the discovery of ignorance. It is not a catalog of facts.

George Lakoff: Frames trump facts. 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.

Ray Kurzweil: (The Law of Accelerating Returns) Evolution applies positive feedback in that the more capable methods resulting from one stage of evolutionary progress are used to create the next stage. Each epoch of evolution has progressed more rapidly by building on the products of the previous stage.

Frank Tipler: (Tipler's Law of Unilimited Progress) 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?

W. Daniel Hillis: The representation becomes the reality. Or more precisely: Successful representations of reality become more important than the reality they represent. Examples: 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.
OK, I've gotta stop. Read them yourself. It is a good exercise to boil big complicated phenomena down into simple laws and princples, I think. Even if you don't quite agree, you at least find that out faster.

Damn, I gotta think of some good law myself. Except for that "Funch's Law" sounds a little clumsy.
[ | 2004-04-07 14:08 | 2 comments | PermaLink ]  More >

 The War President
picture This is a photo mosaic of George W Bush, constructed of pictures of Americans who have died in Iraq since the same self-proclaimed "war president" entered office. I guess they didn't have time to include the 20 or so who died in the last 24 hours.
[ | 2004-04-07 15:25 | 3 comments | PermaLink ]  More >

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