The law of triviality is C. Northcote Parkinson's 1957 argument that people within an organization commonly give disproportionate weight to trivial issues.[1] Parkinson provides the example of a fictional committee whose job was to approve the plans for a nuclear power plant spending the majority of its time on discussions about relatively minor but easy-to-grasp issues, such as what materials to use for the staff bicycle shed, while neglecting the proposed design of the plant itself, which is far more important and a far more difficult and complex task.
The Laws of Simplicity / John Maeda
The simplest way to achieve simplicity is through thoughtful reduction.
How Do Committees Fail To Invent? - Infrequently Noted
Conway's Law is generally discussed in the context of organisations trying to solve a problem. But what if there are defectors? And what if they could prevent all progress without paying a price? This problem is rarely analysed for the simple reason that such an organisation would be deranged. But what if it happened regularly, and even threatened the basis of web standards?
Power: A Primer for Perplexed Economists
Let's Assume an Unfettered Marketplace of Ideas! Or Actually, Let's Not.
Unsimple Truths: Science, Complexity, and Policy
Amazon.com: Unsimple Truths: Science, Complexity, and Policy eBook : Mitchell, Sandra D.: Kindle Store
Claims about scientific rigour require rigour
Nature Human Behaviour - Claims about scientific rigour require rigour
Sturgeon's law
Sturgeon's law states, "Ninety percent of everything is crap". The adage was coined by American science fiction author and critic Theodore Sturgeon while defending the merits of the genre. Sturgeon observed that most works in any field were low quality. Therefore, science fiction was not uniquely inferior.
Andreas De Block on Twitter / X
It took Nature three years to publish this rebuttal, which clearly demonstrates the fundamental flaws in the original paper. In the meantime, the paper's conclusions influenced scientific debate and policy decisions. Such delays in correcting flawed research do real damage. https://t.co/QI3Ei3PE70— Andreas De Block (@DeblockBlock) August 13, 2026
Why we committed to a zero-bugs policy - Linear
When we tell people that Linear maintains a zero-bug policy a common response is disbelief. It may sound like a ridiculous approach, but we do it because no other way makes sense.
The Optimization Trap: Why Too Much Efficiency Makes Us Fragile - The Great Simplification
In this episode, Nate is joined by biologist and biophysicist Olivier Hamant to explore why living systems prioritize robustness over performance, and what that means for a civilization built almost entirely in the opposite direction.
Routledge International Handbook of Complexity Economics | Ping Chen,
The Routledge International Handbook of Complexity Economics covers the historical developments and early concerns of complexity theorists and brings them into
Most arguments scatter across papers, posts, and threads — and evaporate. A claim tree gives them a stable structure to gather against, the way a cathedral gathers centuries of work into a single, standing thing.
Pluralistic: Process knowledge (08 Apr 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
"Intellectual property" was once an obscure legal backwater. Today, it is the dominant area of political economy, the organizing regime for almost all of our tech regulation, and the most valuable – and most controversial – aspect of global trade policy:
atproto payments take: can we do a really really simple one? discourse.atprotocol.community/t/strawman-payment-attestatio…
Strawman: payment attestation by posting the same record to the same rkey
discourse.atprotocol.community"what if engineering a scientific revolution is, at least in part, a problem of organizing humans and coordinating effort?" uniconq.substack.com/p/the-ground-truth-institute h/t @ranganaut.bsky.social
The Ground Truth Institute
uniconq.substack.com#SciComment Nice example of protecting ECRs from critiques that they had no power to avoid...
So I wrote a much longer thing explaining why Minnesota's anti-nudify tech law, while it might be well meaning, is TERRIBLY DRAFTED in a manner that almost guarantees it will be thrown out, giving Elon Musk a win. But also, I don't understand WHY MN legislators wrote such a bad law...
Techdirt
The Worst Person You Know Just Filed A Good First Amendment Lawsuit Against A Very Badly Drafted Nudify App Ban There's been a bunch of news this... techdirt.com/2026/07/30/the-worst-person-y…
