Internet laws, incomplete collection

Goodhart’s law

Goodhart’s law is an adage often stated as,

“When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure”.

It is named after British economist Charles Goodhart, who is credited with expressing the core idea of the adage in a 1975 article on monetary policy in the United Kingdom:
Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes.
It was used to criticize the British Thatcher government for trying to conduct monetary policy on the basis of targets for broad and narrow money,[4] but the law reflects a much more general phenomenon.
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Betteridge’s law of headlines

Betteridge’s law of headlines is an adage that states:

“Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.”

It is named after Ian Betteridge, a British technology journalist who wrote about it in 2009, although the principle is much older. It is based on the assumption that if the publishers were confident that the answer was yes, they would have presented it as an assertion; by presenting it as a question, they are not accountable for whether it is correct or not. The adage does not apply to questions that are more open-ended than strict yes–no questions.

The maxim has been cited by other names since 1991, when a published compilation of Murphy’s law variants called it “Davis’s law”, a name that also appears online without any explanation of who Davis was. It has also been referred to as the “journalistic principle” and in 2007 was referred to in commentary as “an old truism among journalists”.
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Gell-Mann Amnesia effect

“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the”wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”

– Michael Crichton (1942-2008)
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Godwin’s law

Godwin’s law (or Godwin’s rule), short for Godwin’s law of Nazi analogies, is an Internet adage asserting:

“As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.”

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Poe’s law

Poe’s law is an adage of Internet culture which says that, without a clear indicator of the author’s intent, any parodic or sarcastic expression of extreme views can be mistaken by some readers for a sincere expression of those views.
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Cunningham’s Law

Cunningham is credited with the idea:

“The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question; it’s to post the wrong answer.”

This refers to the observation that people are quicker to correct a wrong answer than to answer a question. According to Steven McGeady, Cunningham advised him of this on a whim in the early 1980s, and McGeady dubbed this Cunningham’s Law. Although originally referring to interactions on Usenet, the law has been used to describe how other online communities work, such as Wikipedia. Cunningham relativises his ownership of the law, calling it a “misquote that disproves itself by propagating through the internet” and by saying that he “never suggested asking questions by posting wrong answers”.
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Hanlon’s razor

Hanlon’s razor is an adage or rule of thumb that states:

“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”

It is a philosophical razor that suggests a way of eliminating unlikely explanations for human behavior. It is probably named after Robert J. Hanlon, who submitted the statement to Murphy’s Law Book Two: More Reasons Why Things Go Wrong! (1980).[1] Similar statements have been recorded since at least the 18th century.
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Hitchens’s razor

Hitchens’s razor is an epistemological razor that serves as a general rule for rejecting certain knowledge claims. It states:

“What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence”.

The razor was created by and later named after author and journalist Christopher Hitchens. It implies that the burden of proof regarding the truthfulness of a claim lies with the one who makes the claim; if this burden is not met, then the claim is unfounded, and its opponents need not argue further in order to dismiss it. Hitchens used this phrase specifically in the context of refuting religious belief.
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Russell’s teapot

Russell’s teapot is an analogy, formulated by the philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), to illustrate that the philosophic burden of proof lies upon a person making empirically unfalsifiable claims, as opposed to shifting the burden of disproof to others.
Russell specifically applied his analogy in the context of religion.[1] He wrote that if he were to assert, without offering proof, that a teapot, too small to be seen by telescopes, orbits the Sun somewhere in space between the Earth and Mars, he could not expect anyone to believe him solely because his assertion could not be proven wrong.
The analogy has been criticised by philosophers Brian Garvey, Peter van Inwagen and Alvin Plantinga as to its validity regarding religion. Russell’s teapot has given rise to similar analogies as well as being used in parodies of religion.
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Lem’s law

Lem’s law (Polish: Prawo Lema) is an adage suggested by the Polish science fiction writer and philosopher Stanisław Lem. It is best known from his faux review “Jedna Minuta” (“One Minute”) of the non-existing book One Human Minute (1984), but he formulated it in his correspondence already in 1978. Lem’s law, as translated in English, is stated as follows:

“No one reads; if someone does read, he doesn’t understand; if he understands, he immediately forgets.”

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Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence

“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”

(sometimes shortened to ECREE), also known as the Sagan standard, is an aphorism popularized by science communicator Carl Sagan. He used the phrase in his 1979 book Broca’s Brain and the 1980 television program Cosmos. It has been described as fundamental to the scientific method and is regarded as encapsulating the basic principles of scientific skepticism.
The concept is similar to Occam’s razor in that both heuristics prefer simpler explanations of a phenomenon to more complicated ones. In application, there is some ambiguity regarding when evidence is deemed sufficiently “extraordinary”. It is often invoked to challenge data and scientific findings, or to criticize pseudoscientific claims. Some critics have argued that the standard can suppress innovation and affirm confirmation biases.

See also:

Twyman’s law

“Any figure that looks interesting or different is usually wrong”

following the principle that “the more unusual or interesting the data, the more likely they are to have been the result of an error of one kind or another”.
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Clarke’s three laws

British science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke formulated three adages that are known as Clarke’s three laws, of which the third law is the best known and most widely cited. They are part of his ideas in his extensive writings about the future. The laws are:
> When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

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Occam’s razor

In philosophy, Occam’s razor (also spelled Ockham’s razor or Ocham’s razor; Latin: novacula Occami) is the problem-solving principle that recommends searching for explanations constructed with the smallest possible set of elements. It is also known as the principle of parsimony or the law of parsimony (Latin: lex parsimoniae). Attributed to William of Ockham, a 14th-century English philosopher and theologian, it is frequently cited as Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem, which translates as > “Entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity”

although Occam never used these exact words. Popularly, the principle is sometimes paraphrased as > “The simplest explanation is usually the best one.”

This philosophical razor advocates that when presented with competing hypotheses about the same prediction and both hypotheses have equal explanatory power, one should prefer the hypothesis that requires the fewest assumptions, and that this is not meant to be a way of choosing between hypotheses that make different predictions. Similarly, in science, Occam’s razor is used as an abductive heuristic in the development of theoretical models rather than as a rigorous arbiter between candidate models.
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Schneier’s law

To Schneier, peer review and expert analysis are important for the security of cryptographic systems. Mathematical cryptography is usually not the weakest link in a security chain; effective security requires that cryptography be combined with other things. The term Schneier’s law was coined by Cory Doctorow in a 2004 speech. The law is phrased as:
> Any person can invent a security system so clever that she or he can’t think of how to break it.

He attributes this to Bruce Schneier, who wrote in 1998: “Anyone, from the most clueless amateur to the best cryptographer, can create an algorithm that he himself can’t break. It’s not even hard. What is hard is creating an algorithm that no one else can break, even after years of analysis.”
Similar sentiments had been expressed by others before. In The Codebreakers, David Kahn states: “Few false ideas have more firmly gripped the minds of so many intelligent men than the one that, if they just tried, they could invent a cipher that no one could break”, and in “A Few Words On Secret Writing”, in July 1841, Edgar Allan Poe had stated: “Few persons can be made to believe that it is not quite an easy thing to invent a method of secret writing which shall baffle investigation. Yet it may be roundly asserted that human ingenuity cannot concoct a cipher which human ingenuity cannot resolve.”
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