The figures in this group are jokes, sayings and mock laws, and most of them are about failure: communication that did not happen, arguments that went nowhere, attention that could not be bought. They are the subject's folklore, and like most folklore they record real experience in a form built to travel.
A folklore of the internet
Much of the group was coined online after 1990, and together the entries amount to a working theory of internet argument written by its participants. Godwin's Law predicts the Nazi comparison. Poe's Law notes that parody of extremism cannot be told from the real thing without a signal. Skitt's Law and Muphry's Law record that corrections contain errors. Brandolini's Law says refuting nonsense costs far more than producing it, and Betteridge's Law says a headline ending in a question mark can usually be answered no.
What these share is self-reference and resignation. Many predict their own violation, and almost none offers a remedy. They work less as laws than as recognitions: a way of saying that a frustration is common, has a name, and is nobody's fault in particular.
Older complaints in the same key
The pre-internet entries show the same attitude aimed at other media. Wanamaker's Lament, that half of advertising is wasted and nobody knows which half, is the founding joke of marketing measurement. Whyte's Law says the biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has taken place, and Wiio's Laws say communication usually fails except by accident. Cook's Satire Paradox, from the 1960s satire boom, doubts that satire changes anything. The shared assumption, across seventy years, is that the default outcome of a message is failure, and success needs explaining.
Where they are useful
Some of these are directly practical. Betteridge's Law is a sound reading habit. Brandolini's Law is a reason to choose which falsehoods to answer rather than trying to answer all of them. Warnock's Dilemma, the impossibility of telling whether silence means agreement, boredom or dismissal, is worth remembering before reading anything into a lack of reply. For editors, moderators and anyone who runs a comment section, the group amounts to a field guide to what will go wrong.
Where they are misused
Folk laws are also weapons, and several entries record their use as such. Invoking Godwin's Law can end a discussion without answering the comparison; Berg's Law of Historical Illiteracy is a law about that very move. Gervais's Offence Principle separates being offended from being right, and its critics reply that offence can be evidence that a claim was framed to wound. The Paradox of Internet Arguing began as one side's complaint about the other before the ledger generalised it.
Several also carry misattributions. Cunningham's Law was coined by someone else and disowned by Cunningham. The line that one death is a tragedy and a million a statistic is not Stalin's. The Carnegie entries here, on names and on giving people a reputation to live up to, are claims about influence that later research supports only in narrower forms. Folklore travels with a famous name attached because a famous name helps it travel.
Why it is worth knowing
These sayings are how a culture describes its own communication failures, and they are often more accurate about everyday experience than the formal models. Knowing them helps in two ways. It supplies names for patterns worth noticing, and it makes it easier to spot when one of those names is being used to close an argument rather than to understand it.
The entries behind this essay: Figure in Communication & Media. Every subject has its essays on the essays page.