Thursday, February 19, 2009

The law of recursion

An observation based on reading many comment threads:

As any comment thread grows sufficiently long, the probability that Godwin's law will be mentioned approaches 1.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Oh noooo!

It's so true. Haha. I had to read that several times over in order to notice what was changed from the usual formulation.

Cujo359 said...

I haven't kept any statistics, it does seem to be true. That's particularly true when the subject of the thread is fascism or Nazis, I've noticed.

The odds of someone incorrectly citing Godwin as having determined a winner of an argument also grow toward 1 after a sufficient time, assuming that there are enough commenters to engage in an argument, of course.

Anonymous said...

Sure it does, but by a non-differentiable zero-derivative function, the Devil's Staircase (q.v.) ;-)