I also don’t like “Law” for this, and cynically suspect that the use of “Law” for this sort of thing is at least sometimes at least partly an attempt to co-opt the prestige of actual laws while using “oh I just meant like Murphy” for plausible deniability.
It sounds as if you may be proposing “razor” as a general term for this sort of thing, which I don’t like because there’s a reason why Occam’s Razor is called a razor rather than something else: it’s a tool for trimming off low-value hypotheses. This particular proposition of Zeynep’s is in fact razor-ish, though, so I endorse calling it a razor.
But “first” is ugly, and Zeynep doesn’t use it. I suggest simply “Zeynep’s Razor”.
The “razor” formulation is better than “law” not only because it makes weaker claims to Universal Truth, but also because it correctly suggests a different kind of thing that this is: a methodological principle, of the form “consider these hypotheses before those ones”. Of course the boundary between “consider these hypotheses first” and ”… because they are more likely to be true” is a fuzzy one.
I also don’t like “Law” for this, and cynically suspect that the use of “Law” for this sort of thing is at least sometimes at least partly an attempt to co-opt the prestige of actual laws while using “oh I just meant like Murphy” for plausible deniability.
It sounds as if you may be proposing “razor” as a general term for this sort of thing, which I don’t like because there’s a reason why Occam’s Razor is called a razor rather than something else: it’s a tool for trimming off low-value hypotheses. This particular proposition of Zeynep’s is in fact razor-ish, though, so I endorse calling it a razor.
But “first” is ugly, and Zeynep doesn’t use it. I suggest simply “Zeynep’s Razor”.
The “razor” formulation is better than “law” not only because it makes weaker claims to Universal Truth, but also because it correctly suggests a different kind of thing that this is: a methodological principle, of the form “consider these hypotheses before those ones”. Of course the boundary between “consider these hypotheses first” and ”… because they are more likely to be true” is a fuzzy one.
I note that I also like “Zeynep’s Razor”. Seems about as punchy as “Zeynep’s Law” without slightly weakening the use of the term ‘law’.