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Mark_Friedenbach comments on Rationality Reading Group: Introduction and A: Predictably Wrong - Less Wrong
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Re-reading this sequence resolved for me a long-standing confusion I had. In my day job I do a fair amount of project planning, and there is a wise old adage that I'm sure everyone reading here has heard at least once. It even has a name, Murphey's Law: "Anything that can possibly go wrong, will go wrong."
Anyone who has ever experienced the frustration of managing a real world project knows the truth of this statement. It is not a literal truth -- Murphey's Law is not a physical law, and it is not actually true that every single failure mode is encountered. But you may plan a project and identify 5 different likely failures, expecting to encounter 1 or maybe 2. In reality you actually hit 3 of the ones you identified, plus a 4th that you didn't know about.
The source of my confusion is that the real world is not intentional. Physics lacks the capability to seek out ways to frustrate your attempts at good planning. So how could the universe actively seek out to frustrate project planners? If I calculate the probability of a failure mode from fundamental analysis, why does that probability not match the observed reality?
The answer, of course, is the planning fallacy. A much less wise-sounding, but more true reformulation of Murphey's Law would be: "The number of things which could actually go wrong will exceed the number you will think of, with higher probabilities than you assign." Since your capability to plan is bounded, and since we all suffer from the availability heuristic in constructing our plans and noticing dependent probabilities, this is true.
Good insight!! Once the older boy I nanny for mentioned Murphy's Law to me on the way home from school. I said, "That's a silly law. Let's play a little game called Disproving Murphy's Law." So we all did:
-Hey, that car didn't smash us! -I didn't twist my ankle in P.E. when we ran on bumpy grass! -You didn't give me carrots in my lunch today! -A sniper didn't just shoot us from behind that tree! -We didn't have bad weather!
It's a nice (and sometimes hilarious) game, kind of like the reverse of that multi-use psychology tactic where people are supposed to think of things they're thankful for.
"The number of things which could actually go wrong will exceed the number you will think of, with higher probabilities than you assign."
I'm going to share your revised version with them tomorrow :)
Does Murphy's law necessarily carry negative connotations? Because when I hear people invoking it, they mean Sod's law or “mocked by fate”: of all possible outcomes the worst will happen. At some point I believed that originally Murphy's law didn't carry negative (depressing) connotations, only meant that due to human factor the first trial of a system will be unsuccessful. But reading its Wikipedia page I'm not so sure. It would make sense coming from engineering. Compare with compiling a program code written from scratch, if it's big enough it will guaranteed not run with some stupid error due do a typo or type mismatch or missed array index or whatever. Programmers don't grieve that fate is unfair to them, because errors are supposed to happen, and Murphy's law (as I thought) is just acknowledgement of this phenomenon.
The fact that people believe in Sod's law or “mocked by fate” is just confirmation bias, BTW. When something goes wrong, it's an emotional distress, that people tend to ponder for a period of time, lose mental energy on. When something goes right, it's just expected as normal, not even reflected upon. So people tend to remember bad things better. This is related to availability heuristic: bad things are easily available, good things aren't because easily forgotten and not considered important.
“Birds always dung on my car!” cries Alice, and the image of bird feces from 2 years ago are readily available. It doesn't occur to Alice that all other times except today and that day 2 years ago birds didn't crap on her car at all. This is relevant for CBT, as confirmation bias towards negative events or features lead to various cognitive distortions, e.g. overgeneralization (birds don't always crap on your car) or mental filtering (how about all days when birds didn't crap on your car?).
Yeah, that kind of reminds me of this relevant SMBC. I've heard Murphy's Law also described as "if it can happen, it will." I feel like this is an oversimplification, because obviously not everything that has the potential to occur actually does, but it feels less strictly negative than other connotations.
There are a lot of formulations of Murphy's Law.
One of them is "The perversity of the Universe tends towards a maximum", also known as Finagle's Law.