I heard a reference the Betty Crocker “add an egg” cake-mix story recently. It is: originally, people didn’t buy the cake mix because it felt too easy and didn’t feel loving, or at least sufficiently Calvinistic; General Mills removed the egg, then people cracked one in themselves, and suddenly they felt like they were “baking” and sales took off. This is also known as the IKEA effect, apparently
That got me thinking about all the other “laws” and anecdotes we cite. Conway, Goodhart, the Peter Principle, the Kahneman stuff, “culture eats strategy for breakfast,” “70% of transformations fail,” that thing Colin Powell said, and all the other known unknowns that Twain said.
So I asked the robot to help me start a catalog of shit like this that people say.
After a short time - well, long time - I realized that this list is incredibly long, so I stopped myself for now.