Sister blog of Physicists of the Caribbean. Shorter, more focused posts specialising in astronomy and data visualisation.

Tuesday 29 November 2016

Rhys' Law

If someone else doesn't have this already, which they almost certainly do, I'm totally claiming this as Rhys' Law :

The value of a press release and the probability that the reported discovery is correct is anti-correlated with the grandiosity of the claims.

It's probably not a linear relation. Maybe more like a galactic hydrogen density profile : flat near the middle out to some quite large distance (importance of the claim), but then it drops precipitously beyond the stellar disc (as claims move from "probably" and "show" to "mystery solved" and "proof").
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8 comments:

  1. Dan Weese29 November 2016 at 08:24

    ... unless the headline reads "Astro-boffins say...."

    ReplyDelete
  2. Rhys Taylor29 November 2016 at 08:38

    I think "scientists say they've solved mystery X" is only marginally more credible than a press release announcing that mystery X is solved. So "scientists say" statements would just be a bit closer to the middle.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Tim Stoev29 November 2016 at 12:16

    aka "the next HUGE thing to make us look as smart publishers addressing smart readers"

    ReplyDelete
  4. Dogmatic Pyrrhonist (Tiktaalik Dreaming)29 November 2016 at 13:43

    "a new study says"...

    ReplyDelete
  5. Ivan Petkovic29 November 2016 at 14:03

    Incredible how useful this is. I've just came across "new study shows Einstein's Theory of General Relativity was wrong". Some people published a paper that claims speed of light was infinite near the Big Bang. Great news.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Rhys Taylor29 November 2016 at 14:24

    I think I'm going to have to graph this up xkcd-style when time permits.

    Dogmatic Pyrrhonist Ahh, yes, there may be a fundamental plane where truthiness can be judged by the grandiosity of the claim itself on one axis and the language used on another...

    ReplyDelete
  7. Rhys Taylor29 November 2016 at 14:39

    A thought occurs that maybe this should be grandiosity of the statement as a whole, i.e. drama of claim multiplied by decisiveness of language.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Simon B30 November 2016 at 18:18

    Sorry. It's a corollary of Simon's Law of Preview , which states:

    The longer and more grandiose the preview, the worse the film.

    ReplyDelete

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