For those of us that dwell on the outside of the scientific, mathematical, and philosophical realms, it’s not an everyday occurrence to have things named after you. I’m not speaking of physical structures so much in terms of… laws. People like Newton, Boyle, and Bernoulli get laws and principles named after them because they ostensibly discovered such things. With the coming of an age of mass media and information, though, a new offspring formed as a consequence -- laws of everyday occurrences. Pop culture laws, really. You know, like Murphy’s Law. Such adages have come to pass because in modern times, information and concepts are much more easily disseminated to like-minded people (or in many cases, people that find those ideas hysterical). And that started even before this wacky thing called “the internet.”

Murphy proves to be the tip of the iceberg in the case of these everyday adages -- the popular Internet reference site Wikipedia lists nearly fifty such items. A quick glance down the entries provided me with a new favorite thought:

Hanlon’s Razor: “Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity."

How’d the guy end up with a razor, though, instead of a law or principle? “Stay the hell back, man, or I’ll cut your ass with my sense of philosophy!”

Academics with Attitude, coming soon to The Discovery Channel.

So, the question of the moment -- how does one end up with this particular honor? The most easily explained answer (see also: Ockham’s Razor – yes, another razor) is that when you say something brilliant in front of your friends and associates, they’re probably going to adopt the idea and share it with others. More precisely stated:

Inspired statements made to appreciative audiences of sufficient size tend to propagate.

This is also known as “Grovemiller’s Theory of Communicative Phenomena,” mostly because I just pointed it out and want credit where credit is due. The underlying problem with naming things versus Grovemiller’s Theory in action is that people have a peculiar habit of calling things whatever they damn well please, barring copyright issues. It’s a lot like trying to give yourself a nickname:

Me: Hi, from now on, you guys should call me “The Fonz.”

Them: Hey, nice nickname. Too bad we’re going to call you “Boner” instead.

This in turn is probably going to be known as “Grovemiller’s Theory of Inverted Effort,” which is simply stated, “The harder you try, the less likely you are to succeed.” I say “probably” only because I don’t care as much about this one as the other one, which means that by the rule itself, that’s the one that’s more likely to actually be called that.

But all of this comes back to the fact that in these modern times, even the most niche information can receive exponential boosts to propel it from obscurity through "cult craze," then on into "mainstream" where, if it stays too long, it becomes cliché, and people get sick of it. It might even go away entirely -- except in Germany, for whatever reason. It seems that the German society tends to work like a thrift store, going through the closets of other western cultures and taking out the things that were tremendously popular at one point, and there they go to dwell until fashionable again.

(I suppose that phenomenon can be called "The Hasslehoff Principle.")

Consider, though, that media exposure has actually made us more fickle. It can come out disguised as some sort of attention deficit symptom, as looking at societal behavior, we tend to jump from one craze to another. But examine the cause of it -- we now have too much information available to us. We jump from fad to fad because there's so much out there to absorb at one time, not because we become easily bored with what we have. And as a result, the importance of what we're working with becomes diluted. It's harder now to separate the real breakthroughs from the novel fluff, because we don't have the time to properly examine what's at hand. Do you ever wonder why the world seems to produce less "great thinkers" than before? I strongly suspect that they're still out there, and that they may even be heard in small audiences, but their ideas don't have long enough to gestate in our culture for their thoughts to really take off, because the media has already presented us with "the next big thing."

We've passed the sweet spot on our cultural Laffer Curve. On one end of the scale, you have history's early great thinkers -- those Greek fellows like Socrates, Plato, Archimedes. The Renaissance brought another age of enlightenment, and delivered us names like DaVinci and Michaelangelo. In each age, you can name a few "superstars of thinking." There are of course hundreds of more minds that developed ideas as well, but the communication infrastructure of the day was only so big -- history remembers the superstars, because it was on their name that their work was given wings. Their brilliance seemed even more defined because their singular notoriety.

On the other end of the curve is the modern era, where we have the aforementioned cultural noise where brilliant ideas propagate but are then washed out. The superstars appear to be few and far between, because we're trained not to dwell on the impressiveness of their ideas, but rather to acknowledge and move on to the next thing. It's hard to name one specific great figure like a DaVinci. Instead, we get inundated with Jessica Simpson, Tom Cruise, and, oh… William Shatner. We can't even fall back on a Bill Clinton at this point.

But somewhere in the middle of all this history, we hit the right mark on the curve -- the time when great ideas met just the right about of communicative propagation -- the late 18th, 19th, and a bit into the early 20th centuries. The media of the day was pervasive enough to expose all the thoughts and ideas of the day to massive audiences, but it wasn't fast enough to deliver them in an unmanageable wave. It's during this period in history that the great minds of the day could all become superstars. Look at some of the names: Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Victor Hugo, Alexander Dumas, Keats, Jonathan Swift, Monet, Van Gogh, Carl Jung, and Sigmund Freud. That's just thirteen names across various disciplines. Even now, you've probably just added another five to the list without even trying. I didn't even list any Russians; let's throw a little credit the way of Leo Tolstoy as well, for the writing, sure, BUT he also had an awesome beard.

So it's fair to suggest, being on the saturated side of the curve has actually led us to the creation of these new pop-culture adages. It's become a way for us to cope with the never-ending stream of thoughts that are presented to us. We take what we like, or what makes sense, slap a name on it, and in doing so we've helped give it a way to float on the sea of ideas. Living in our marketing-driven culture, our ideas need branded to help their survival rate.

All the same, try mentioning Hanlon's Razor during the course of conversation some time -- chances are, your conversation partner will assume that it's a new six-bladed shaving tool that was just introduced. Just remember -- it's not malice, it's stupidity.