Can we start calling these Observations or Razors or something, but not Laws?
Usually people are like “ohh, well we mean ‘Law’ like Murphy’s Law not like thermodynamics.” But that cheapens something like this which is meant to be taken more seriously than “Murphy’s Law.”
During the height of the Gender Wars, “Briffault’s Law” was often rebutted by pointing out (1) the context it occurred in was an observation and (2) was not specifically about humans (although it was implied it could scale to them). This first bit of this rebuttal is only possible because the strength of the observation was either overstated as a “Law” (e.g. thermodynamics) in one context or understated in another (e.g. Murphy).
So much of the value in what could be a more valuable observation was lost because “we” obfuscated it by calling it a ‘Law’ when it wasn’t that in either sense. Let’s stop making this mistake.
I also don’t like “Law” for this, and cynically suspect that the use of “Law” for this sort of thing is at least sometimes at least partly an attempt to co-opt the prestige of actual laws while using “oh I just meant like Murphy” for plausible deniability.
It sounds as if you may be proposing “razor” as a general term for this sort of thing, which I don’t like because there’s a reason why Occam’s Razor is called a razor rather than something else: it’s a tool for trimming off low-value hypotheses. This particular proposition of Zeynep’s is in fact razor-ish, though, so I endorse calling it a razor.
But “first” is ugly, and Zeynep doesn’t use it. I suggest simply “Zeynep’s Razor”.
The “razor” formulation is better than “law” not only because it makes weaker claims to Universal Truth, but also because it correctly suggests a different kind of thing that this is: a methodological principle, of the form “consider these hypotheses before those ones”. Of course the boundary between “consider these hypotheses first” and ”… because they are more likely to be true” is a fuzzy one.
Can we start calling these Observations or Razors or something, but not Laws?
Usually people are like “ohh, well we mean ‘Law’ like Murphy’s Law not like thermodynamics.” But that cheapens something like this which is meant to be taken more seriously than “Murphy’s Law.”
During the height of the Gender Wars, “Briffault’s Law” was often rebutted by pointing out (1) the context it occurred in was an observation and (2) was not specifically about humans (although it was implied it could scale to them). This first bit of this rebuttal is only possible because the strength of the observation was either overstated as a “Law” (e.g. thermodynamics) in one context or understated in another (e.g. Murphy).
(I scanned Briffault’s book where he wrote the observation several years ago if you want to verify: https://archive.org/details/TheMothersTheMatriarchalTheoryOfSocialOriginsImages )
So much of the value in what could be a more valuable observation was lost because “we” obfuscated it by calling it a ‘Law’ when it wasn’t that in either sense. Let’s stop making this mistake.
So, I propose we call this: Zeynep’s First Razor
I also don’t like “Law” for this, and cynically suspect that the use of “Law” for this sort of thing is at least sometimes at least partly an attempt to co-opt the prestige of actual laws while using “oh I just meant like Murphy” for plausible deniability.
It sounds as if you may be proposing “razor” as a general term for this sort of thing, which I don’t like because there’s a reason why Occam’s Razor is called a razor rather than something else: it’s a tool for trimming off low-value hypotheses. This particular proposition of Zeynep’s is in fact razor-ish, though, so I endorse calling it a razor.
But “first” is ugly, and Zeynep doesn’t use it. I suggest simply “Zeynep’s Razor”.
The “razor” formulation is better than “law” not only because it makes weaker claims to Universal Truth, but also because it correctly suggests a different kind of thing that this is: a methodological principle, of the form “consider these hypotheses before those ones”. Of course the boundary between “consider these hypotheses first” and ”… because they are more likely to be true” is a fuzzy one.
I note that I also like “Zeynep’s Razor”. Seems about as punchy as “Zeynep’s Law” without slightly weakening the use of the term ‘law’.