Testing Godwin's Law
January 2nd, 2008 by Mitch Frazier
Last week I came across Godwin's Law. Many of you may already be familiar with it. For those of you who aren't, Godwin's Law, according to wikipedia, states:
As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.
To test this law I wrote a little program to look at comments in the drupal database that contains the Linux Journal web content. The script first gets all the distinct article ids (nids in drupal speak) from the comments table where the comment includes one of the key words. Then it gets a count of the number of comments for each article, sorts the list, and outputs the count along with the article title.
Here's the script:
#!/bin/bash
source mysqlpwd.sh
echo "<table border=\"1\">"
echo "<thead>"
echo "<tr><th># Comments</th><th>Article Title</th></tr>"
echo "</thead>"
echo "<tbody>"
mysql -u $MYSQL_USERNAME -p$MYSQL_PASSWORD drupal_lj \
-e "SELECT DISTINCT nid FROM comments WHERE comment LIKE '%hitler%' OR comment LIKE '%nazi%'" |
while read nid
do
if [[ $nid != 'nid' ]]; then
count=$(mysql -u $MYSQL_USERNAME -p$MYSQL_PASSWORD drupal_lj \
-e "SELECT COUNT(*) AS cnt FROM comments WHERE nid = $nid")
count=$(echo ${count/cnt/})
printf "%d\t%d\n" $count $nid
fi
done | sort --numeric --reverse |
while read count nid
do
t=$(mysql -u $MYSQL_USERNAME -p$MYSQL_PASSWORD drupal_lj \
-e "select title from node where nid = $nid")
t=$(echo ${t/title/})
printf "<tr><td>%d</td><td><a href=\"/node/%d\">%s</a></td></tr>\n" $count $nid "$t"
done
echo "</tbody>"
echo "</table>"
Here's the output:
For comparison we need to get a list of articles that contain a large number of comments but that do not contain the keywords. Now we look at each article, then we check to see if it has any comments that contain the keywords. If it does not then we count the number of comments and output the article if the associated discussion was long. I arbitrarily chose 100 as the minimum number of comments needed for a discussion to be classified as long.
Here's the script:
#!/bin/bash
source mysqlpwd.sh
echo "<table border=\"1\">"
echo "<thead>"
echo "<tr><th># Comments</th><th>Article Title</th></tr>"
echo "</thead>"
echo "<tbody>"
mysql -u $MYSQL_USERNAME -p$MYSQL_PASSWORD drupal_lj \
-e "SELECT nid FROM node" |
while read nid
do
if [[ $nid != 'nid' ]]; then
count=$(mysql -u $MYSQL_USERNAME -p$MYSQL_PASSWORD drupal_lj \
-e "SELECT COUNT(*) as cnt FROM comments WHERE nid = $nid AND
(comment LIKE '%hitler%' OR comment LIKE '%nazi%')")
count=$(echo ${count/cnt/})
if [[ $count -eq 0 ]]; then
count=$(mysql -u $MYSQL_USERNAME -p$MYSQL_PASSWORD drupal_lj \
-e "SELECT COUNT(*) AS cnt FROM comments WHERE nid = $nid")
count=$(echo ${count/cnt/})
if [[ $count -gt 100 ]]; then
printf "%d\t%d\n" $count $nid
fi
fi
fi
done | sort --numeric --reverse |
while read count nid
do
t=$(mysql -u $MYSQL_USERNAME -p$MYSQL_PASSWORD drupal_lj \
-e "select title from node where nid = $nid")
t=$(echo ${t/title/})
printf "<tr><td>%d</td><td><a href=\"/node/%d\">%s</a></td></tr>\n" $count $nid "$t"
done
echo "</tbody>"
echo "</table>"
Here's the output:
Can we conclude anything about the validity of Godwin's Law from this? Ahhh, I dunno.
p.s. File this under blather #2.
__________________________Mitch Frazier is the System Administrator at Linux Journal.
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It's a counter-meme. The purpose is to invalidate itself.
On January 14th, 2008 Anonymous (not verified) says:
The point of Godwin's law is to be a counter-meme:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.10/godwin.if.html
"In time, discussions in the seeded newsgroups and discussions seemed to show a lower incidence of the Nazi-comparison meme."
godwin's law
On January 6th, 2008 Seppo (not verified) says:
Perhaps an additional refinement would be to look for some kind of time related association - like if the h & n stuff is increasing or lessening with time, or something... you can probably find several more similar ways of studying this... ;)
here in Europe one might try for a EU grant for studying this in depth... ;)
Best
Seppo
Wow, this Godwin is one
On January 3rd, 2008 Anonymous (not verified) says:
Wow, this Godwin is one messed up dude.
Some professor at Standford came out with a more pertinent observation about 10 years ago, saying as time goes on it's inevitable there will be a nuclear war. I'm sure there are an infinite number of pithy observations that can be made when you take something and apply infinity to it. They all seem profound. They all need a bit of common sense to override the insanity behind them.
Maybe they should require all high school students to take enough logic and math to understand "laws" before being allowed to graduate. If nothing else if we inundate them with a few hundred of these mental puzzles they won't be so susceptible to them when they encounter them in real life. Ahh, who am I kidding. We'd have to teach them how to read, locate the USA, and teach them a little history first and you know that's never going to happen.
That's not Godwin's Law
On January 3rd, 2008 Anonymous (not verified) says:
That's not Godwin's Law, as I understand it. Godwin's Law states that in any given discussion, whoever is the first to make a comparison to Hitler or the Nazis loses the argument, by definition.
Not quite.
On January 3rd, 2008 Jeff Eaton (not verified) says:
"As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one." That's Godwin's Law, and it was formulated as a tongue in cheek way of *reducing* Nazi comparisons in usenet board threads -- by making light of an increasingly common rhetorical hot-button.
It's definitely an amusing experiment. Maybe we can find someone who runs an active political site to conduct the same test on their data. RedState? DailyKos?
Post length Distribution
On January 3rd, 2008 JLF (not verified) says:
Could you provide us the full length distribution ?
Then we can normalize the "Godwin" comments distribution and figure out if the normalized frequency increases with the length.
Yay! Insanity is COMMON in sysadmins! I'm normal!
On December 1st, 2007 Shawn Powers says:
See, I love the effort you put into this. Really, I do. The part that ticks me off, however, is that it's taking all the effort I can muster not to comment about hitler and nazis on every article on the website. Or any website for that matter.
Now my Saturday is shot.
__________________________Shawn Powers is the Associate Editor for Linux Journal. You might find him chatting on the IRC channel.
Resist the temptation
On December 1st, 2007 Mitch Frazier says:
I almost titled the second table "These Articles Need Help", but I resisted the urge. I find that push-ups help.
__________________________Mitch Frazier is the System Administrator at Linux Journal.
Hah!
On January 2nd, 2008 Taran (not verified) says:
And here I thought Hitler was going out of style. Fun post, Mitch. :-)