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And now, a break from our regularly-scheduled ultrapolarized vitriol.
Courtesy of our often quoted source Wikipedia.
The Wilcox-McCandlish Law of Online Discourse Evolution, developed by Bryce Wilcox and Stanton McCandlish on Usenet, ca. 1996, is:
The chance of success of any attempt to change the topic or direction of a thread of discussion in a networked forum is directly proportional to the quality of the current content.
There are numerous corollaries:
* McCandlish's First Corollary to the Wilcox-McCandlish Law
o The chance of any change to the topic or direction of a thread being a change for the better is inversely proportional to the quality of the content before the change.
* The Exception to McCandlish's First Corollary
o When a thread reaches the flame war stage, all changes in thread topic or direction will be changes for the worse.
* McCandlish's Second Corollary to the Wilcox-McCandlish Law
o Thread bandwidth consumption increases in inverse proportion to thread content quality.
* Wilcox's Corollary to the Wilcox-McCandlish law
o The more involved one is in a flame war, the less likely one is to recognize it as such.
* McCandlish's Third Corollary to the Wilcox-McCandlish Law
o Any attempt at recourse to formal logic or identification of classic fallacies will simply increase the irrationality of the discussion.
o The Sub-corollary to McCandlish's Third Colollary
+ It is likely that this is so because the use of formal logic immediately raises the quality of the discussion to unity, thus guaranteeing the next followup will be a non sequitur.
* The Wilcox-McCandlish Paradox
o Thread degeneration can (theoretically) be forestalled or even reversed by citation to the Wilcox-McCandlish Law.
==========
Benford's law of controversy, as established by science fiction author Gregory Benford in 1980, states
Passion is inversely proportional to the amount of real information available.
Courtesy of our often quoted source Wikipedia.
The Wilcox-McCandlish Law of Online Discourse Evolution, developed by Bryce Wilcox and Stanton McCandlish on Usenet, ca. 1996, is:
The chance of success of any attempt to change the topic or direction of a thread of discussion in a networked forum is directly proportional to the quality of the current content.
There are numerous corollaries:
* McCandlish's First Corollary to the Wilcox-McCandlish Law
o The chance of any change to the topic or direction of a thread being a change for the better is inversely proportional to the quality of the content before the change.
* The Exception to McCandlish's First Corollary
o When a thread reaches the flame war stage, all changes in thread topic or direction will be changes for the worse.
* McCandlish's Second Corollary to the Wilcox-McCandlish Law
o Thread bandwidth consumption increases in inverse proportion to thread content quality.
* Wilcox's Corollary to the Wilcox-McCandlish law
o The more involved one is in a flame war, the less likely one is to recognize it as such.
* McCandlish's Third Corollary to the Wilcox-McCandlish Law
o Any attempt at recourse to formal logic or identification of classic fallacies will simply increase the irrationality of the discussion.
o The Sub-corollary to McCandlish's Third Colollary
+ It is likely that this is so because the use of formal logic immediately raises the quality of the discussion to unity, thus guaranteeing the next followup will be a non sequitur.
* The Wilcox-McCandlish Paradox
o Thread degeneration can (theoretically) be forestalled or even reversed by citation to the Wilcox-McCandlish Law.
==========
Benford's law of controversy, as established by science fiction author Gregory Benford in 1980, states
Passion is inversely proportional to the amount of real information available.
