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Comment by wpasc | Hacker News Reader

I just read that, and I love it. HN has introduced me to named conventions that I have been loving: Betteridge's law, Hitchen's razor, and now the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect

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I sort of have the opposite reaction. These days it seems like people are so eager to trot out one of these phrases with a "look-how-informed-I-am" attitude, whether or not it's genuinely applicable.

If I'm talking about the "Gell-Mann Amnesia effect" in daily conversation, I'm just gonna describe it like Crichton does in the quote, since naming it properly is going to result in having to explain it anyways, and the whole thing just comes across as being a bit self-important.

Learning the proper names for these concepts has been a huge benefit of reading HN.

I've been collecting them for the past few years and now have enough for a bingo card.

Absolutely agree. Does anyone have a compiled list of these types of concepts?

My list in reverse chronological order:

baumol's cost disease,

Chesterton's fence,

Berkson's paradox,

goodhart's law/Campbell's law,

Gell-Mann Amnesia affect,

Ship of Theseus,

The Zeigarnik effect,

Conway's law,

selection bias

heffindal index,

Betteridge's law of head lines,

survivorship bias,

bayes theorem

black swan,

Dunbar number,

Anscombe's quartet,

false positive/false negative,

fundamental attribution bias,

type 1 type 2 thinking,

grok,

simpson's paradox,

Hawthorne effect,

dunning kruger,

Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon,

flynn effect,

Moving the overton window,

Sturgeon’s law

cobra effect, bikeshedding

Since you're keeping a list: it's "Herfindahl".

That's what I get for just copy pasting a personal note. Thanks for the fix.

Most of the concepts HN members love to use to sound well educated while arguing on the internet are in this list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases

Betteridge’s law of headlines is one name for an adage that states: "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."

My personal favorite is Poe’s Law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law?wprov=sfti1

It seems like Betteridge's Law has been catching on among the better sort of journalist. The NYT recently ran "Is Loneliness a Health Epidemic?", and I shook my head in anticipation of another article wildly overselling a weak claim. Instead, it was a measured piece cataloging excess hype on the topic and problems with commonly-cited loneliness studies. The author eventually arrived at "loneliness is a real concern, but not an epidemic".

Which is all tangential, but it's great to finally see a journalist write a yes/no headline and actually notice that the answer is 'no'.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/09/opinion/sunday/loneliness...

You know Hanlon’s Razor and Heinlein’s Razor? Then there’s Finagle’s law (well known) and my favorite correlary, O’Toole’s: “The Perversity of the universe tends towards a maximum.”

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor

http://muchow.dk/ttrttc/?p=565

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finagle%27s_law

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