The godwin’s law or Godwin’s Nazi Rule of Analogies it is technically a statement of social interaction proposed by Mike Godwin in 1990 that states that: “As an oline discussion lengthens, the probability that a comparison will appear in which Hitler or the Nazis are mentioned tends to one”.
But a new study suggests that the likelihood of someone being compared to Hitler or another Nazi actually decreases with the duration of an online discussion.
Reddit analysis
By analyzing 199 million Reddit posts, the study established that the probability of observing the terms ‘Nazi’ or ‘Hitler’ actually decreases significantly with the duration of the conversation.
Furthermore, a corollary of the Godwin’s Law argues that ‘the invocation of Godwin’s Law is usually done by an individual who is losing the argument’ and thus the comparisons to the Nazis are a sign of the end of an argument. While it is difficult to determine whether or not a discussion on a given topic ended in a large data set, a marked increase in conversation duration was also observed when the words ‘Hitler’ or ‘Nazi’ were interleaved again.
Since both observations defy intuitive and widely accepted truisms, other words were subjected to the same set of tests. Within the context of the initial question, these results suggest that it is not inevitable that conversations will eventually stumble into the reductio ad Hitlerum, and that such comparisons do not kill conversations.
Now let’s hope that another study will be conducted on Benford’s law of controversy, especially applicable to discussions on Internet forums, although it can be applied in general to all types of discussions between humans: “The passion associated with a discussion is inversely proportional to the amount of real information available.” Wave Wilcox-McCandlish Law of Evolution of Online Speech: “The probability of success of any attempt to change the subject or direction of a discussion in an online forum is directly proportional to the quality of the current content.”