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Stolen shamelessly from The London Telegraph, I wondered how many of these posting characteristics you've spotted at emrupdate.com?
1. Godwin’s Law The most famous of all the internet laws, formed by Mike Godwin in 1990. As originally stated, it said: "As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving *** or Hitler approaches 1." It has now been expanded to include all web discussions. It is closely related to the logical fallacy “reductio ad Hitlerum”, which says “Hitler (or the ***) liked X, so X is bad”, frequently used to denigrate vegetarians and atheists.
The same being applied to we Climate Change doubters.
2. Poe’s Law Not to be confused with the law of poetry enshrined by Edgar Allen Poe, the internet Poe’s Law states: “Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humour, it is impossible to create a parody of fundamentalism that someone won't mistake for the real thing.”
I take this to infer that without sprinkling debate with sufficient smilies, some of the post readers won't quite catch the intended sarcasm or humor being attempted. Oh,
3. Rule 34States: “If it exists, there is porn of it.” See also Rule 35: “If no such porn exists, it will be made.” Generally held to refer to fictional characters and cartoons, although some formulations insist there are "no exceptions" even for abstract ideas like non-Euclidean geometry, or puzzlement.
Marge Simpson appeared on the cover of Playboy. Enough said.
4. Skitt’s Law Expressed as "any post correcting an error in another post will contain at least one error itself" or "the likelihood of an error in a post is directly proportional to the embarrassment it will cause the poster."
Once published there is very little you can do to correct a gramatical, typo or too enthusiastic a post. RSS feeds, mirrors, Google cache all conspire to trip up the hasty or hurried poster.
5. Scopie’s Law States: “In any discussion involving science or medicine, citing Whale.to as a credible source loses the argument immediately, and gets you laughed out of the room.” First formulated by Rich Scopie on the badscience.net forum.
This for the frequent conspiracy theorists out there.
6. Danth’s Law (also known as Parker’s Law) States: “If you have to insist that you've won an internet argument, you've probably lost badly.” Named after a user on the role-playing gamers’ forum RPG.net.
Do any of us ever think we've won an argument? A thread from years ago can easily be resurrected, reheated and ready for new action every week.
7. Pommer’s Law Proposed by Rob Pommer on rationalwiki.com in 2007, this states: “A person's mind can be changed by reading information on the internet. The nature of this change will be from having no opinion to having a wrong opinion.”
True. The internet is full of completely incorrect factoids which people take as true.
8. DeMyer's Laws Named for Ken DeMyer, a moderator on Conservapedia.com. There are four: the Zeroth, First, Second and Third Laws.
The Second Law states: “Anyone who posts an argument on the internet which is largely quotations can be very safely ignored, and is deemed to have lost the argument before it has begun.”
Careful next time you quote someone!
9. Cohen’s Law Proposed by Brian Cohen in 2007, states that: “Whoever resorts to the argument that ‘whoever resorts to the argument that... …has automatically lost the debate’ has automatically lost the debate.”
CLASSIC. Love it!!!!!!!!
10. The Law of Exclamation First recorded in an article by Lori Robertson at FactCheck.org in 2008, this states: "The more exclamation points used in an email (or other posting), the more likely it is a complete lie. This is also true for excessive capital letters."
See 9. above.
Of course there others.
Striesand Effect - the UK has this last week where some hot-shot attourney's tried to gag the press reporting a British company dumping toxic waste in Africa. The more you try to hide a fact, the more people discover it. This was Barbara Striesand attempting to hide pictures of her cliff-side property.
Can you think of any?
Nick
Nick Harrington email me or Skype: nickharrington emrupdate.comIf I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants" Sir Isaac Newton 1676
The animus of a posting is proportional to the anonymity of the poster.
mchasemd
Two of the people I like to quote from are Poe and Churchill. For example:
Al
Al Borges, M.D.
My favorite Churchill quote:
"Never give in. Never give in. Never, never, never, never--in nothing, great or small, large or petty--never give in, except to convictions of honor and good sense. Never yield to force. Never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy. "
William "Reddy" Biggs, MD
Managing Partner, 23 physician Internal Medicine group
"Live on eClinicalWorks since 2/1/2007" http://tinyurl.com/reddybiggs
BTW, did you guys catch 'freedom citizen' in the H1N1 vaccine discussion, actually do 2 of the 10 rules here?
I was ROFL.
He actually used whale.to as a reference. This was the first time I had seen somebody do that, and actually mean it. I thought that law #5 was just a joke. Obviously I was wrong.
I was hoping he would stick around to see how many more he would do for us, since he got off to such a good start.
The tin foil "hatter" formerly known as "freedomcitizen" = a.k.a. "HSS". I'm surprised you didn't notice. The IP logs for these 2 "different" posters would be revealing...
(EMR user for over 15 years.)
Dr. Osler - highest rated by patients.
Yup, the "Never give in. Never give in. Never, never, never, never--..." quote is probably one of his best!!