Cunningham's Law
Origin
A maxim Ward Cunningham (wiki inventor) jokingly told colleague Steven McGeady in the 1980s. Asking directly on the internet gets few replies; posting a wrong answer instantly summons crowds who say "no, it's actually this!" An asymmetry of human psychology — correcting is more fun than teaching.
Meaning
How Reddit, X, and Stack Overflow operate. Teaching feels of low value; seeing someone wrong activates the ego to correct. Content marketing, opinion formation, collective intelligence all run on this mechanism.
Lesson — Meeting Eastern Classics
Analects 7.21: "Among any three people, one is my teacher — follow what is good, correct what is not." Confucius taught the ethic of correction. Cunningham measured how that ethic operates on the internet.
"誤" combines speech (言) with disagreement (吳) — speech gone wrong. Analects 15.30: "Not correcting an error is the real error." The mistake is not 誤 itself, but failing to fix it. Cunningham showed 誤 is the bridge to correction.
