Laws You Should Know

My Fifteen Favorite Laws

Tuten’s Law (2016) Competence will be punished usually with more work.

Tuten’s Law of committees (2017) The people with whom it is easiest to work are those who least make the work about themselves.

Moore’s Law (1965) – The number of transistors that can be placed on an integrated circuit (silicon chip) doubles every two years.  Gordon E. Moore co-founder of Intel

Parkinson’s Law (1955) - Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.

Parkinson’s Law of Triviality (1957) - The time spent on any item of the agenda will be in inverse proportion to the sum involved. By C. Northcutt Parkinson (I know he has two laws)

Law of unintended consequences - The actions of people (and especially of governments) always have effects that are unanticipated or unintended. These often outweigh the intended effects.

Godwin’s Law - As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.

Clarke's Third Law -  Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Goodhart's law – When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

Bradford's law – a pattern described by Samuel C. Bradford in 1934 that estimates the exponentially diminishing returns of extending a library search.

Dunning–Kruger effect – a cognitive bias in which unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly rating their ability much higher than average. This bias is attributed to a metacognitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their mistakes.

Hanlon's razor – inspired by Occam's razor - "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity."

Peter Principle – "In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence."

Postel's law – Be conservative in what you do; be liberal in what you accept from others.

Technology Law of Amplification: While technology helps education where it’s already doing well, technology does little for mediocre educational systems; and in dysfunctional schools, it can cause outright harm. Originated with Kentaro Toyama

A partial list of other eponymous laws can be found at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_adages_named_after_people

Lincoln’s Mercy

It is a truism that our political language is coarser and meaner than in previous generations.  Bernie Sanders has implied Hillary Clinton has been corrupted by Wall Street. Then we have Donald Trump who has, in the view of many blown past previous limits of political jibes by calling opponents “losers,” “hypocrites” and even “disgusting.” I’m not even going to imagine the advertising hit piece the PACs will put out this summer.

Candidate Ben Carson pointed out in a debate that the comments section for online articles revel in mean-spiritedness. I agree with him. They inevitably disappoint me, make me cringe, even anger me. It is clear that many people do not begin to read pieces in a fair or open way. They have an opinion of the writer, the publisher, the topic or at least boxes to put them in and toward which they direct disdain, rage or worse, genuine hatred. Abraham Lincoln had the temperament to make it a practice to behave differently. Not always, but frequently he practiced mercy. 

He offered mercy as only a president could, legally. He gave amnesties, pardons, mitigated sentences and commuted others. He exercised these forms of mercy in cases singular and in patterns. Some individual pardons came about because friends or political allies prevailed upon him such as Zeno Kelley who had been convicted of outfitting a ship for transporting slaves, yet members of the Massachusetts congressional delegation prevailed upon the president and Kelley got his pardon in March, 1865. Lincoln showed mercy to civilians who had committed fraud, larceny, assault, robbed the mail, counterfeited money and committed bestiality. He extended forgiveness to people of different social stations and all across racial lines. When civilians committed crimes in the District of Columbia they had not governor to appeal to so they importuned the president.

The Dakota tribe in Minnesota became embroiled in a war against the United States in 1862 in defiance of being stripped of land rights and the general failure of the Bureau of Indian Affairs to meet treaty terms promised to them. The U.S. Army, led by Civil War veterans, defeated the Dakota and 303 tribe members received death sentences. Lincoln, despite widespread anger among Minnesotans and a hearty push from Union officers to proceed with hanging commuted 264 of them to prison terms.

Much of Lincoln’s mercy involved his role as Commander in Chief in a time of war. The highest percentage of cases he considered covered Union soldiers who had been court-martialed, and Confederates accountable for treason. These, while forgiving, also had value in winning the war, and he hoped, the peace. 

In cases of military justice Lincoln’s most common acts involved deserters. Although branded cowards, subject to imprisonment at hard labor or execution, he offered many pardon on the condition that they return to their unit and serve out the remainder of the war. In a much grander act in conjunction with Congress, he signed both a law and a proclamation offering amnesty to deserters who returned to service just over a month before his death. He, and congress, wanted both the manpower and wanted restore those persons to good standing in society after the war. 

In his “Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction” of December 8, 1863 the President offered full pardon to Confederates who took an oath of loyalty. It is hard for us today to imagine the emotions of such an act. Imagine someone who had led troops that killed and wounded dozens from an infantry company formed in your town being forgiven. That did not seem just to many, but Lincoln hoped it would make it much easier for Confederates to quit their losing fight and lay down their arms. He also gambled that lenience would be vital in “binding up the nation’s wounds” once the fighting stopped.

In extending lenience when others wanted a different vision of justice, punishment, or revenge, he spent political capital among friends and political allies. While some examples of his mercy are singular and resulted from personal connections, his views of mental illness, and his forbearance toward youthful mistakes, he also had an important tactical and strategic vision. Forgiveness and mercy do not fit with the mood of our times, as our course politics and the anonymous internet comments remind us.

Let's Lose the Lost Cause

I know well how the South Carolina State House, and more recently its grounds, look with the Confederate battle flag flying over it. I grew up in the path of Sherman’s March through South Carolina in what is now part of Rev. Clementa Pinckney’s senate district. During Jimmy Carter’s presidency and the prime time era of the “Dukes of Hazzard” I learned the basic tenets of the Lost Cause. The Confederacy had been a noble failure, it held, one that demonstrated the martial virtues of southern soldiers and their officers; but the Cause came up short due to the industrial and man-power advantages held by the Union. 

Funny that slavery wasn’t mentioned. It would be inaccurate to say that I learned that slavery had no role in the causes for the war, because slavery only came up as a result of the war.

While boys outside the South debated the merits of Ken Stabler versus Terry Bradshaw I remember sitting in a lean-to fort in the woods behind a friend’s house arguing over how Robert E. Lee could have won at Gettysburg. Being raised in that distinctively native southern white mindset leaves a mark, and it is difficulty to unlearn faith in the myth of the Lost Cause. That unlearning is what many white southerners must do. 

Studying history helped me unlearn the Lost Cause, but I also unlearned it by watching others perform the rituals of it. In college I saw how members of one southern fraternity held annual balls where all the members dressed as dandified Confederate officers. Almost none of them would have had ancestors who rose above enlisted rank, I realized, and what they were doing was using memory of the war to define themselves as special, important, and leaders in the present. By implication they mattered more than other southerners who were black or poor.

The image of the Confederate ancestor in the southern mind is central to the Lost Cause problem. Those who know (or at least assume) they had ancestors who fought imagine them as a younger version of Robert E. Lee or Stonewall Jackson: lean, handsome, serious-minded and brave men with a fervent belief in Confederate nationalism, States’ Rights, and protecting their homes.

No doubt that image fits some soldiers, but relatively few. By 1862 the first conscription act for the Confederacy in April of 1862 established the draft and, it extended all one-year volunteer commitments to three years. The government had already begun to run out of volunteers who would sign-up for their cause and man its armies and it had to put in a stop-loss to insure the original volunteers didn’t leave. Moreover, the draft had to be violently upheld with Home Guard units — a potent reminder that the entire economic and social structure of the South rested on violence. Make no mistakes, the Confederacy not only supported violence to preserve slavery; it also used it violence to force non-slave owners to fight.

Do those holding fast to the myth consider that at least one in ten of their Confederate veteran ancestors deserted?

I knew from childhood that I had ancestors who served. At least one was drafted and another ancestor died of wounds defending Charleston. More recently I have learned of others, though, who were Unionists. Official affidavits say other relatives hid from the draft by living on little islands in the swamps. I can’t see how flying the Battle Flag honors them. 

The Lost Cause myth whitewashes all of those parts of southern heritage just as it conveniently forgot the thousands of African American Marylanders taken into slavery by Lee’s invading army in 1862.

Alabama took down the Battle flag with no fanfare. Wal-Mart, eBay and other outlets for commerce gave it up with corporate memos. South Carolina has done it through the legislative process.

The 150^th anniversary of the end of that cruel war, and now the removal of the battle flag from South Carolina’s state house grounds in reaction to yet more terrorism against African Americans is the right time to bury our Lost Cause fantasies too.