JG etc.

When you get out of school you forget the names but you remember the principles. Negative selection, in terms of the name, still doesn’t ring a bell. That could be because the Wiki definition of it is in the context of politics.

Anywho, here are a few that I always liked.

Peter Principle

The Peter Principle is a theory originated by Dr. Laurence J. Peter. It states that successful members of a hierarchical organization are eventually promoted to their highest level of competence, after which further promotion raises them to a level at which they are not competent.

Negative Selection

The person on the top of the hierarchy, wishing to remain in power forever, chooses his associates with the prime criterion of incompetence - they must not be competent enough to remove him from power. The associates do the same with those below them in the hierarchy, and the hierarchy is progressively filled with more and more incompetent people.

Parkinson’s law

Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion. Parkinson’s Law could be more generalized still as: “The demand upon a resource always expands to match the supply of the resource.”

Group Think

A mode of thinking that people engage in when they are deeply involved in a cohesive in-group, when the members’ strivings for unanimity override their motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of action. The word groupthink was intended to be reminiscent of George Orwell’s coinages (such as doublethink and duckspeak) from the fictional language Newspeak, which he portrayed in his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.