What 'Cunningham's Law' Really Tells Us About How We Interact Online

I’m sure you’re familiar with the XKCD comic “Duty Calls” in which an internet users is passionately typing away late into the night because “someone is wrong on the internet!” The comic illustrates Cunningham’s Law, the tongue-in-cheek axiom that states “the best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question, it’s to post the wrong answer.”

The principle behind Cunningham’s Law isn’t new—there’s even a French saying that translates to “preach the falsehood to know the truth”—but even though it’s well-established, Cunningham’s Law is hardly an effective way to gather information online—and actually tells us more about how the internet seems to invite us to disagree about everything.

The philosophy behind Cunningham’s Law

Posting a lie to get to a truth works (sometimes) because people love seeming smarter than other people. But while the rush of dopamine and smugness that comes with making a stranger feel stupid is a stronger motivator than answering a question honestly, the substances of those answers are likely to be way worse. That means that though the number of people intentionally posting incorrect information in pursuit of the right answers is probably small, you can’t actually trust the heated corrections posted in response to any disagreeable opinion you encounter online, even if it was sincerely given.

Why Cunningham’s Law doesn’t work

It disproves itself. Cunningham’s Law is attributed to Ward Cunningham, the man who created the first online wiki, by way of former Intel executive Steven McGeady, who worked with Cunningham back in the 1980s. But Cunningham says he never said it and doesn’t believe it. “I never suggested asking questions by posting wrong answers,”Cunningham says in a video, “this is a misquote that disproves itself by propagating through the internet as Cunningham’s Law.”It’s not a “law.” If the best way to get a right answer on the internet was really to post a wrong answer, there wouldn’t be so many lies online. It’s more trouble than it’s worth. If you have a factual question, posting a misleading query somewhere online and hoping some jerk notices is way more trouble than just looking up the answer yourself. And easy-to-check facts are the only way the “law” is even marginally useful. For more complicated questions, Cunningham’s Law is fully useless.Internet correctors are almost never actual experts. The motivation of a Cunningham answerer is likely to be something like “I’ll show them!” but “putting idiots in their place” is mostly the purview of insecure people with time on their hands. People who have a background in a complicated field are way more likely to sigh and shake their heads sadly than correct some randos facebook post. Engaging with everyone who thinks something stupid online would take a lifetime and make no difference, so most experts don’t. That leaves only know-it-all amateurs and pedants to answer.The more complex the question, the more likely the answers are to be wrong. Posting something like “Capitalism is the best economic system” would bring a bunch of fervent Marxists out of their Kibbutz to tell you how you’re wrong, but if drew any actual economists, their response would be something like “it depends,” or “it’s complicated.”What we want to be true vs. the truth: Crowd-sourced echo-chambers like Reddit and Twitter are notorious for spreading misinformation. People tend to upvote/like/share things they want to to be true, as opposed to the actual truth, so whether the correction to your question is visible often has more to do with how popular it is than its veracity.Hidden motivation and inconvenient truths: I’m far from an expert, but I have a working knowledge of genre screenwriting—I went to school for it, and was professionally involved for a bit. I used to visit screenwriting forums, and one day I honestly answered a user’s question about the likelihood of making a living as a screenwriter while living in the Midwest. This was met with an overwhelming number of furious posts from both fledgling screenwriters and screenwriting experts telling me I didn’t know what I was talking about and I’m a total idiot.

It was the opposite of Cunningham’s Law: I know it is exceedingly uncommon that anyone makes money as a screenwriter, especially if they aren’t in LA or New York, but if you read the forum, you’d conclude the opposite. The users didn’t want to be told it probably wouldn’t happen for them. The “experts” said I was wrong too, because they make money from books and seminars that rely on their marks believing in the the possibility of movie-biz success. Most anyone with professional experience would agree with me, but they were long gone from the forum, no doubt after meeting the same kind of ire I did. The end result: For anyone reading that forum, according to experts and writers alike, screenwriting is a viable career path.

It spreads lies. In this article on The Outline, Kevin Donnellan put Cunningham’s Law to the test and spent a week posting bad-faith facts online in the hopes of being corrected. He was mostly ignored, but a post he made to a Facebook astronomy group wasn’t. He took a photo of a space-volcano on Venus with the caption: “3D perspective of Maat Mons on Mercury.” The commenters didn’t respond with “That’s on Venus, you impossible idiot.” Instead, the post was liked, and commented upon as if it was true. A few hours later, someone corrected him, but until they did, any of the 240,000-strong group who saw the post believed it and potentially spread it. It’s low-key trolling. The motivations of the internet’s loudmouths is clearly to prove they are smarter than you. But what of the motivations of people who posts fake questions? It’s another level of trolling, but it’s trolling anyway. Contributing to the awful way people relate to each other online is should be avoided. At the risk of drawing contradictions in the comment section, we can be better than this.