Miller's law

Miller's Law can refer to three different principles.

In communication

Miller's law, part of his theory of communication, was formulated by George Miller, Princeton Professor and psychologist.

It instructs us to suspend judgment about what someone is saying so we can first understand them without imbuing their message with our own personal interpretations.

The law states: "To understand what another person is saying, you must assume that it is true and try to imagine what it could be true of."^{[1] [2]}

The point is not to blindly accept what people say, but to do a better job of listening for understanding. "Imagining what it could be true of" is another way of saying to consider the consequences of the truth, but to also think about what must be true for the speaker's "truth" to make sense.

In psychology

The observation, also by George Miller, that the number of objects an average person can hold in working memory is about seven.^[3]

In software development

Miller's Law was formulated by Mike Beltzner and is named in respect of Dave Miller, long-standing owner of the Bugzilla product:

"All discussions of incremental updates to Bugzilla will eventually trend towards proposals for large scale redesigns or feature additions or replacements for Bugzilla." ^[4]

References