This product was not featured by Product Hunt yet. It will not be visible on their landing page and won't be ranked (cannot win product of the day regardless of upvotes).
Hey Product Hunt,
Everyone quotes these laws. Almost nobody checks them.
Parkinson's Law, the one about work expanding to fill the time available, was a satirical essay in The Economist in November 1955. A joke about the British Civil Service. There has never been controlled evidence for it, and it still gets used to justify cutting project timelines.
Hofstadter's Law is a joke too, from a 1979 book. The planning fallacy quoted right next to it is Kahneman and Tversky, empirical, with a documented fix in reference class forecasting. Most advice on estimation treats the two as one idea and then tells you to pad your estimates, which is exactly the move the joke was mocking.
So I traced 1,116 named laws, effects and principles back to their primary sources and rated every one: Empirical, Heuristic, Folk-adage or Contested. 64% of the 25 best-known rest on something other than measurement, against 45% of the index as a whole.
There's also a graph joining all 1,116 with 1,572 cross-links, 134 of which are laws that directly contradict each other.
Free, no signup, no ads, no tracking, and the whole dataset is downloadable.
I'd genuinely like to know which entry you think I've got wrong.
No comment highlights available yet. Please check back later!
About The Law Tome on Product Hunt
“1,116 named laws, every one sourced and rated”
The Law Tome was submitted on Product Hunt and earned 4 upvotes and 1 comments, placing #144 on the daily leaderboard. The largest index of named laws anywhere: 1,116 principles, effects, razors and paradoxes, against about 300 in the next-biggest list.
The Law Tome was featured in Productivity (658.2k followers), Writing (59.3k followers) and Education (79k followers) on Product Hunt. Together, these topics include over 196.2k products, making this a competitive space to launch in.
Who hunted The Law Tome?
The Law Tome was hunted by Krishna Chagti. A “hunter” on Product Hunt is the community member who submits a product to the platform — uploading the images, the link, and tagging the makers behind it. Hunters typically write the first comment explaining why a product is worth attention, and their followers are notified the moment they post. Around 79% of featured launches on Product Hunt are self-hunted by their makers, but a well-known hunter still acts as a signal of quality to the rest of the community. See the full all-time top hunters leaderboard to discover who is shaping the Product Hunt ecosystem.
Want to see how The Law Tome stacked up against nearby launches in real time? Check out the live launch dashboard for upvote speed charts, proximity comparisons, and more analytics.
Krishna Chagti