
I created Godwin's Law in 1990 as a warning - miraj
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/when-i-created-godwins-law-1990-it-wasnt-prediction-it-was-warning-1562126
======
drdoom
> My view, which I've held for many decades now, is that glib and frivolous
> invocations of Hitler, or Nazis, or the Holocaust, are a kind of forgetting.

So true. I have myself observed / felt this several times. My experience is
that the facts of any discussion are laid out pretty quickly at the beginning.
There is something that prolongs the discussion and heats up the arguments on
all sides and I believe it is our collective emotional baggage, or lack of it.
Some twist their words to mean anything just to stay in the conversation, some
dig in their heels in the hopes of never having to be proven wrong, some stick
to the bare facts but ignore others' emotional investment, etc. And some just
enjoy trolling as if it is a spectator sport where they flame both sides but
without any meaningful contribution of their own towards a resolution.

Sadly, I have not found an approach that works better than to quit the
discussion cold turkey.

~~~
sillysaurus3
The number of people here that are describing trolling as fun, amusing, and
effective is pretty high. I wonder why this is the case? Even if so many
people enjoy being an ass or ruthlessly screwing over other people, it's
strange that they'd openly admit it.

One possibility is that it's a byproduct of the school system. Most of us
spent years at each other's throats in a Lord of the Flies type environment,
so it's natural for this behavior to transfer to the internet.

~~~
maxerickson
They don't necessarily mean that it is fun to be an ass.

I think it's probably a fine line, but there are "trollish" comments that can
be made that aren't even disingenuous, never mind nasty or negative.

The so called old school trolling wasn't about disruptive behavior, it was
about getting people to consider thoughts that they aren't necessarily
comfortable with. And not necessarily uncomfortable in a dark or disturbing
way.

~~~
golemotron
Trolling is a good way to induce the sort of cognitive dissonance that changes
minds. Jonathan Swift's 'A Modest Proposal' is an exemplar of this.

------
cokernel
This essay is about the need to think and argue mindfully rather than "with
glib allusion".

It's disappointing that the early comments here were all focused on issues
irrelevant to the content of the essay, issues that moreover would be easily
avoided with wget or curl, or even just turning off JavaScript and images in
any common browser. The essay's right in the HTML with zero obfuscation
applied. Yes, there's cruft there, too. Such is life.

While I've been writing this comment, the distribution of comment quality has
changed, which is somewhat heartening.

~~~
return0
It has a lot to do with the structure commonly used in comment boards. There
is no way avoid derailment by setting a direction to the conversation. It's
the central limit theorem of the internet, really, the sum of a large number
of opinions tends to be normally distributed around "mediocre".

------
danharaj
The nazis have been reduced to an abstract symbol of evil. The ways that they
co-opted liberal institutions to seize power is ignored. They happened in real
life. They used the same levers of power everyone else agrees are legitimate.
They weren't a dark cloud of evil sweeping through Germany, they were human
beings acting with purpose and intent. Their means can be analyzed. The
fascists today work the same way as the fascists of yesterday.

There's that apocryphal statement "fascism will come to America wrapped in a
flag". Maybe, maybe not. But I know that if fascism manages to seize absolute
power again, and it is getting perilously close with all these far-right
governments getting elected all over the place and the ever increasing
audacity with which liberal governments bring their weapons down on the human
beings that stand in their way, it will do so while shrieking "free speech"
all the way. Free speech is such a, such a _sacred_ institution, and it's
supposed to keep us safe from tyranny. Just like democratic elections, right?

And everyone will act surprised how suddenly it seems we are in their grips.

Sticking to ideals and trying to have an ideology of "freedom" doesn't stop
nazis. Fascists of all stripes need to be treated as engaged in concrete power
struggle, not abstract ideological debate.

~~~
tokenadult
I agree with you that we should be wary and stick to sound ideals. The other
day I read a column by Bloomberg View columnist Leonid Bershidsky arguing,
"Right-Wing Populists Are Running Out of Time,"

[http://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-05-26/trump-
and-...](http://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-05-26/trump-and-his-
imitators-are-running-out-of-time)

so perhaps danger of a neo-Nazi movement is lessening while we stay wary and
stick to ideals.

By the way, Bershinky's very latest column directly discusses Godwin's Law,
the main topic of this thread, and is titled "Comparisons to Hitler Can Be
Useful. Discuss."

[http://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-05-27/comparison...](http://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-05-27/comparisons-
to-hitler-can-be-useful-discuss)

------
Dylan16807
> a physicist named Travis Hoppe argued only last year that his analysis of
> Reddit data disproved the law.

What he disproved was the corollary, that whoever mentions Nazis has lost and
ended the argument. People mistakenly refer to that corollary as "Godwin's
law", but that's as far as the conflict goes. There is no disagreement about
the statistics. Nazi references will happen in a supermajority of moderately
large discussions.

------
skylan_q
You guys might not be noticing, but we've thrown the "Hitler/Nazi" stuff
around so much that it doesn't have meaning anymore. It's actually been
rehabilitating fascism and anti-semitism.

~~~
TillE
On the list of reasons for the rise of the extreme right in Europe (for
example), I doubt that cracks the top 1000.

~~~
skylan_q
Calling regular people nazis make them associate more with nazis.

~~~
pessimizer
I firmly believe that the media drove Trump much farther into the racist right
than he originally planned to go. Originally he was just anti-
immigrant/nativist, just like every other Republican and many Democrats, and
then he put his foot in his mouth when he tried to differentiate the character
of illegal immigrants who come over the Southern border from illegal
immigrants who fly in or come in on work and student visas. There is a
difference, in that immigrants from the Southern border are very average
people, from very near the U.S., and frequently have U.S. ties - it's just a
cheaper process, paid for more in sweat and blood than in cash. Immigrants who
come in on expensive visas to work and go to school, and who pay for expensive
travel to and from the U.S. are more likely drawn from the middle and upper-
middle classes of their countries of origin.

To him, that meant rapists, drug dealers, and murderers, because he's a rich
Manhattan/Connecticut conservative, disgusted by and suspicious of people who
work with their hands. "The wall" is something that has been added to in a
bipartisan way by xenophobes from both sides of the aisle for a couple of
decades at this point, and it was somehow used as evidence that he's more
racist than the rest of Congress in combination with that remark.

Sadly, it turned out that the image that the media smeared him with was _even
more_ attractive to a majority of white American men than the "I make good
deals" persona alone, he immediately became unstoppable, and leaned into it as
far as he could. Not that I'm saying that he hasn't always been a bit racist
(most libertarian conservatives are), but I don't think that it was a dominant
part of his worldview, or that he would have ever dreamed of running for
President on a primarily racist platform.

Hope I didn't say anything offensive here, I tried to be careful...

~~~
mindcrime
_most libertarian conservatives are_

I don't quite get this.

What do you mean by "libertarian conservative", and where do you get the idea
that most are racist? Libertarians and conservatives might superficially seem
to be aligned in many ways, but when you look at it, libertarians align with
liberals in just as many ways... so "libertarian conservative" isn't really a
meaningful term in the strict sense.

I guess you could say "conservative with some libertarian tendencies", but
anyone who is actually a libertarian is pretty much not racist by definition,
given that libertarianism is a pretty much a radically individualistic
ideology in which skin color, ethnicity, race, religion, gender, etc. play no
role at all.

~~~
pessimizer
Libertarians are advocates of the idea that protecting and maintaining current
property assignments and their orderly transfer between consenting parties is
the basis of civilization. In addition, they see this as a moral value that
assures that people who are productive will have more, and people who are less
productive will have less. Through this moral belief, it defines what people
do who have as productive, and what people do who don't have as less
productive. In this, it completely ignores primitive accumulation and the
fencing off of the commons, and says that in a perfect capitalism, everything
will have found its level. Therefore, if Africans are poorer than Asians,
Africans are by nature less productive than Asians. If black Americans are
poorer than white Americans, there is an intrinsic quality within them that is
keeping them from being valued enough to be rewarded.

Libertarianism is a radically collective ideology that wishes to shrink
government into a police force to protect property, and a totalitarian
bureaucracy that catalogs the ownership of every object that its police force
can reach. It is an ideology that insists that skin color, ethnicity, race,
religion, gender or anything that ever happened in the past play no role at
all in the present.

Or rather, that's how I feel about it. And in my experience, all libertarians
that I've met have harbored ideas that I think of as racist (even the very
nice ones, and very insightful ones), and I've observed that when you see
libertarianism grow, you see overt racism grow within its protective bubble.

~~~
mindcrime
That's not consistent with the Libertarian ideology that I'm familiar with, or
the views of most of the Libertarians I know.

------
personjerry
I thought he was going to make a more general point--that as discussions go
on, more and more extreme references and analogies will be made, until
inevitably comparisons to the "best" and "worst" things in history are made.

~~~
milcron
The general point would probably be: As discussions approach infinity, the
probability of _any arbitrary string_ appearing in conversation approaches 1.

There's no predictive power in the statement whatsoever so it doesn't really
tell us anything.

~~~
anotherevan
What a superlative way of completely missing the point.

------
draw_down
This law is terrible,or at least how it's used. It just gives an out for
idiots to call as soon as the word Nazi comes out, so they can stop talking
about the issue at hand and instead demonstrate their familiarity with this
stupid thing.

Nazis are an example of ultimate evil, that's why they come up. The law was
coined with good intentions but the way people use it drives me batty.

~~~
hartpuff
> It just gives an out for idiots to call as soon as the word Nazi comes out

Something even worse happens on Reddit. Whenever anyone mentions Nazis or
Hitler, someone is _absolutely, certifiably guaranteed_ to fall over
themselves trying to be the first (in the thread; the 876458430854th overall)
to post: "Hitler killed Hitler".

Followed inevitably by: "But he also killed the man who killed Hitler".

------
SFJulie
My experience is that the root cause of nazism did not disappear and that some
argument leads to Godwin point.

Censorship of opinion by calling trolls whoever call an argument that is an
obvious slippery slope to old nazis argument will not stop people from taking
the slippery slope. And also under-educated people using the nazi red flag to
apply political correctness censorship.

And well, maybe nazism should be renamed for capsocism when capitalist
claiming monopoly should be enforced by states and market negotiation for the
workers killed.

We are going back to shit ages. Where birth and so called merit of birth or
power worth more than everything.

Sorry mister Godwin, our era is preparing itself for dark ages.

------
nerdponx
If anything, this thread taught me that some people actually take Godwin's law
to be something other than tongue-in-cheek.

~~~
ry_ry
Including Godwin himself.

I'd always assumed it was a clever piece of off-the-cuff satire, and related
to ill considered or reactionary responses in a debate.

It hadn't occurred to me the whole thing might a po-faced social experiment.
Still, history is written by the victors* and all that.

------
rdiddly
So in short, Godwin's Law is descriptive, and intended to be subtly
prescriptive in the opposite direction.

------
JustinAiken
Sometimes a comparison to Nazis is wholly appropriate.

~~~
eprime
Could you give an example of an appropriate comparison?

~~~
tryitnow
Rwanda, Bosnia, Latin America death squads, the Confederacy, Andrew Jackson's
March of Tears, the list sadly goes on and on.

Your question is a bit odd. History is chock full of examples of genocide,
ethnic cleansing, slavery, etc.

This is the problem I have with Godwin's Law - sometimes a comparison to Nazis
is entirely appropriate.

~~~
malka
None were turned into an industry of death the way the nazis did

~~~
RileyKyeden
This is why the picohitler is such a handy unit of measurement.

------
rdiddly
If Nazis have been reduced to superficiality through glib comparisons ("crying
Nazi"), then it's worth pointing out that Godwin's law has suffered the same
fate through its own glib application ("crying Godwin"). We need a Godwin's
Law for Godwin's Law.

<edit>This has been dubbed Diddly's Law:</edit>

"As the years roll by on the internet, the probability of someone mentioning
Godwin once Hitler has been mentioned, is approaching 1."

~~~
DjangoReinhardt
Can we call this the R-Diddly law, please?

~~~
rdiddly
How about Diddly's Law. I'm fine with that, hah!

------
chvid
Mr. Godwin could also have mentioned Islam and Donald Trump's movement in the
US. Two major movements which often get compared to Nazism even in well-
established media.

I think personally think it is a sign of a combination of lack of tact,
knowledge and an unwillingness to compromise.

~~~
daveguy
Or it could be a sign that Trump is a fascist.

------
tunap
The most efficient way to forget is to not contemplate or revisit. Godwin's is
just the result of copious retrospection on the dirty/dark side of human
nature. Which is warranted in lesser extremes than genocide, as well, IMO.

I didn't open link, based on non-nazi references to the page's elements. I
have, however, read enough literature on 'lizard brains', group dynamics and
human nature to realize we, as a species, need constant reminders of the
damage done by our tendencies to oppress & extinguish those who we deem
"different".

~~~
jrapdx3
> I didn't open link, based on non-nazi references to the page's elements.

I assume the "link" is to the article. If so, that's unfortunate, the article
was very well written and thought provoking.

The essential message Godwin has tried to impart is the antithesis of "lizard
brain" reactivity, to be aware of what we are in fact saying or writing, and
appreciate the gravity of invoking the memory of Nazi behavior or holocaust
tragedy.

Yes, reminders to refresh consciousness of our tendencies to regress are
absolute necessity and constantly useful.

Edit: wording/grammar.

------
eprime
I have heard from several fellow HackerNews readers (in other forums) that
Godwins Law doesn't apply anymore mainly because of their opposition to Trump,
and their own or their allies behaviour in breaking this law. It seems to
imply that because we live in the current year, the present day, that previous
laws no longer have validity, because of the false assumption that the present
day has more importance than any other time, ever. (This assumption ignores
history, tellingly). That, and they consider that in Trumps case the
comparisons can actually have validity.

The other reasoning given from our fellow peers that I have heard sounds like
that this law was made during the era of quiet bulletin boards, made up of
people with a shared mind set, with a shared sense of humour, and the Internet
now has changed beyond recognition. Therefore any laws made about the internet
back then have no validity.

I would like to suggest that when you consider something no longer valid it
could give you pause to think about your reasonings for doing so.

~~~
geofft
1\. Godwin's Law says that as a discussion continues, the probability of a
Hitler reference approaches one. It doesn't say anything about the aptness of
a Hitler reference. It certainly does not say that you should not make a
Hitler reference, or the one who does loses the debate. The only way you could
"break" Godwin's Law is to _refuse_ to make Hitler references.

2\. Mike Godwin himself says that comparing Trump to Hitler is justifiable.
[https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/12/14/...](https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/12/14/sure-
call-trump-a-nazi-just-make-sure-you-know-what-youre-talking-about/)

3\. Usually when I see comparisons of Trump to Hitler, and discussions of
whether that comparison is defensible, there's rarely any discussion of how
the "present day" changes anything. Godwin does make the point that in 2015,
we now have the capability to question poor arguments more effectively. But
I've seen basically no arguments that the _world_ is fundamentally different
from the past, just that _Trump_ is a fundamentally different demagogue from
those we've seen since 1946.

~~~
skylan_q
WaPo, funded by Bezos, who has plenty to lose from a Trump presidency will
obviously do anything he can to tout that Trump = Hitler.

~~~
geofft
OK, so you're saying that Mike Godwin's integrity has been compromised and
he's been influenced by Bezos to denounce Trump? Why did we trust him in the
first place -- why should we care about Godwin's Law at all if it comes from a
man so easily swayed to the interests of the rich?

(Or are you claiming that Mike Godwin doesn't actually mean the things that
the Washington Post published under his name?)

------
matt4077
The anti-intellectualism runs deep with HN. Anything not posted on
facebook.github.io/react, twitter or bitcoin-daily-earn-money-fast.suckers is
deemed worthless. Technical measures to get this useless drivel are, however,
deeply sought after and their use, even when illegal/morally gray is
advocated.

As longs as it's not a car manufacturer not sharing the GPL-licensed code they
did not use. Then it's top posts three days in a row. I mean, a CONFIGURATION
MANAGEMENT SYSTEM, what's a book, any book, in comparison? Even Gödel, Escher
Bach doesn't compile.

~~~
cokernel
I think our experiences may differ. Just looking through stories I've seen on
the front page recently, there's the following:

* A slave in Scotland

* They knew it was round, damn it

* Two hundred terabyte proof is largest ever (granted, the 200 TB is not what's really interesting here)

* How the ArXiv decides what's science

* Visiting Chelsea Manning in prison

* Hiroshima (1946)

This seems like a healthy mix of topics, and they don't seem to have been
deemed worthless.

I have noted a certain amount of hostility to philosophical topics, but I
would venture a guess that there's been hostility to philosophy in general at
all periods in history.

I expect to see a certain percentage of comments in an HN thread about how the
topic is presented. Everybody's got to let off some steam sometimes. I made my
initial comment because I was surprised at how many comments addressed _only_
how the topic was presented rather than that and the actual content.

~~~
matt4077
Yeah, that comment was over-the-top. It's indeed sometimes excellent to see
articles out-of-left-field here, because the perspective is different,
somewhat deep and, well, new.

If it's a non-IT topic that comes up more often, it feels like a group
identity has the ability to form that's a bit agressive towards anything
considered different. I notice it with non-technical approaches, people,
groups, institutions, customs, or media, such as social sciences, the UN,
Politics, The New Yorker (just made up, don't go searching), Religion (and I
even agree on the facts), Teacher, Art (expt. DeepDream), Women (in comment-,
not voting power, see early vs. late threats).

But even in these, if people didn't have a chance to form a group opinion
because it's rare, the discussion is excellent, and your examples are
excellent!

I'll just read the threads a day later after everything has settled and stuff
like my comment's been sunk to the graveyard :)

------
Swizec
Trolling IS fun. Great way to learn multiple sides of any argument AND to
discover why people care in the first place. It's a good way to learn about
people.

~~~
bobwaycott
But aren't there better ways to learn about people and why they care about an
issue in the first place?

~~~
kachnuv_ocasek
From my experience, I've found that trolling and Socratic dialogue bring out
the key points forthright and also highlight the most severe points of
disagreement. That usually doesn't happen so fast when arguing with hard facts
(when applicable). You can also hardly say that about a Wikipedia article or a
propaganda poster/website/book.

~~~
bobwaycott
It kind of makes the philosophy student in me worry to see trolling and
Socratic dialogue offered as seeming equivalents. Though, I suppose Socrates
was a damn good troll in his time.

------
rdiddly
Why don't you surprise me by not downvoting this after reading just the first
sentence, because it is a serious question:

Is "never forget" really the best response to a trauma in the first place? I'm
not sure this is a settled question. If I'm raped let's say, should I carry
that rape vividly in my head every day for the rest of my life, in the hopes
of avoiding it in the future? If I do that, haven't I already in fact ruined
that future by thinking about the same trauma every day and making it part of
my reality? Also, if you believe some people, that which you think about
constantly, even for purposes of avoiding it, is exactly what you bring into
being, in both subtle and, some say concretely manifest ways.

Maybe instead I should try to forget the incident (knowing I never really
will, but letting go of it as much as possible) and move on with my life?
Those who are haunted by traumatic memories would probably love to forget them
if they had the option.

What if we utterly forgot about Hitler. Would we be worse off, really? Do we
NEED to study injustice to learn justice? Do we need to study brutality to
learn kindness? Or do we just get our hands dirty by acculturating ourselves
to things that are not justice, not kindness? Again I'd say it's far from a
settled question.

~~~
dredmorbius
What I see as most useful is _incorporating the lessons of the experience to
avoid it in future._

Recognising a problem, particularly a complex one based in _dynamics_ of a
situation, is often difficult. Systemic resposes, feedback, nonlinearity,
stocasticity, unknown external inputs, etc., etc., mean that life _isn 't_
deterministic. At the same time, there are signs of things Not Going Well.

To take the relationship / rape case, there are red flags and circumstances in
which unwanted outcomes are more likely. Knowing these and being aware of them
can make all the difference. While catastrophic events can themselves be
hugely truamatic, a small action early on can often avoid them.

In complex circumstances where you've got to _convince others of the problem_
, this can be ... complicated.

[https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2fsr0g/hierarc...](https://www.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2fsr0g/hierarchy_of_failures_in_problem_resolution/)

Ultimately, what you're looking for is the ability to take a traumatic
experience _and build behavioral responses which avoid it in future_. The
"never forget* element is part of that -- the size and brightness of the red
flag. But responding to that flag appropriately is the other part.

(And if the red flags have white circles and reversed swastikas, pay all the
more heed.)

------
mback00
He should have mentioned Chuck Norris in the discussion.

~~~
rdiddly
On that note, anyone feel like maybe we need a Godwin's Law for Star Wars &
Star Trek? Someone will always mention the Force, Jedi, "young Paduwan," the
droids you're looking for, a bad feeling about this, on the one hand, and warp
speed, beam me up, fascinating, the holodeck, the Borg etc. on the other. Or
maybe that's just the nerds I associate with.

------
kbutler
Now Godwin's just being a nazi.

