Cobra Effect · People and organisations
Cunningham’s law
The fastest way to get the right answer is to post a wrong one.
6 cards, read aloud in 2:20, with a test and sources.
You need an answer. You post a question. Nothing happens.
It sits there for a day. Two views. No replies. So you try something else. You post a confident, slightly wrong answer to your own question.
Within the hour, three strangers have corrected you in detail.
One of them with sources. The best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question. It is to post the wrong answer. That line is called Cunningham’s law.
Cunningham says he never said it.
Ward Cunningham invented the wiki in 1995, the kind of page anyone can edit that Wikipedia is built on. Steven McGeady of Intel named the law after him in 2010, saying Ward had told him something like it in the early 1980s. Cunningham has called it a misquote that disproves itself by spreading, and says he never advised asking questions by posting wrong answers. Which is, of course, exactly what the law predicts.
Why it works. Correcting is cheaper and sweeter than answering.
A question asks a stranger to do work for you. A wrong answer offers them the chance to be right at your expense. One is a favour. The other is a pleasure. People will also correct you for free because a wrong claim, left standing, feels like a hole in the floor.
Don’t use it as a trick. Use it as a habit.
Posting deliberate nonsense to farm corrections wastes the goodwill it depends on, and people notice. The honest version is this. Don’t ask a blank question. State your best guess and ask what’s wrong with it. It gets you a better answer, and it shows the answerer where you actually are. A guess is a claim someone can push against. A question is only a hole.
So before you ask, guess.
Write your answer first, even if it feels half right. Then ask for the correction, not the answer. Being wrong out loud is the fastest way to stop being wrong.
Sources
- Ward Cunningham, Wikipedia. The inventor of the wiki, with a section on the law, McGeady’s 2010 naming of it, and Cunningham’s own disavowal.
- The Wiki Way, Bo Leuf and Ward Cunningham, 2001. How the first wiki worked and why a page anyone can correct beats a page only an expert can write. This page is about the original wiki. Search the title to find the book.
- Duty Calls, xkcd, 2008. One panel. Someone is wrong on the internet, and a man cannot come to bed until it is fixed. The whole law in a drawing.
Nearby ideas
- Falsifiability. A claim that nothing could disprove tells you nothing.
- Psychological safety. Teams only learn from the mistakes they feel safe to admit.
- The testing effect. Pulling an answer from memory teaches more than reading it again.
- Pournelle’s iron law of bureaucracy. In any organisation, those who serve the organisation end up in charge.
- The bus factor. How many people could leave before the work stops.
- The iron law of oligarchy. Even democratic groups end up run by a permanent few.
- The Shirky principle. Institutions tend to preserve the problem they exist to solve.
- Sayre’s law. The smaller the stakes, the fiercer the argument.