Murphy's law

[EmptyBottle]

I've stated Murphy's law a lot, and I have a feeling some people want to know more.

Murphy's law - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Murphy's law basically states that errors can and will happen. Something "guaranteed" can fail in a variety of interesting and good/bad ways. (eg it is good for me if some HVAC fails into an off state... if the temp is too high or low with it on)

Delivery delays, systems go offline for some hours (like SaSu yesterday), and oh yes... the "guaranteed online" Facebook went down for hours too:

Understanding how Facebook disappeared from the Internet

Today at 1651 UTC, we opened an internal incident entitled "Facebook DNS lookup returning SERVFAIL" because we were worried that something was wrong with our DNS resolver 1.1.1.1. But as we were about to post on our public status page we realized something else more serious was going on.

blog.cloudflare.com

I just keep thinking of Murphy's law when someone makes claims like "this is guaranteed to work"... because... there are so many ways the chain of causality can collapse.

 

[Forever Sleep]

I suspect a lot of us feel persecuted by sod's (or Muphy's) law. I suppose another phrase is simply, bad luck.

I tend to find if there's a 50% chance I will have gotten something right, it's more likely I will be wrong. It's like 50% chance of a favourable outcome doesn't seem high enough for me.

But then, I once read an article on 'bad luck'. People who think fate is conspiring against them. They drop their toast and it lands butter/ jam side down. The reality is that that side is heavier. That's simple physics I guess.

A friend used to almost take weather personally! 'It will just be my luck that it rains when I need to go out.' Kind of funny though- to think a rain cloud is stalking them, just waiting...

Sometimes I just think it's confirmation bias. We simply take it for granted all the times the bus was on time, we didn't drop the toast or, it didn't land butter side down. Our favourite websites weren't down. We maybe don't make such a mental note of all the times things went right. We're certainly not always grateful for the times they go right- which means we must be expecting a favourable outcome the majority of the time so I suppose in fact, we don't truly believe we are under some constant curse. We'd be expecting the worst outcome everytime otherwise so- it wouldn't come as a shock or disappointment. Maybe more an inevitability.

It's also funny in a way we take it so personally. If it does rain, we won't be the only ones to get wet! Maybe fate was aiming for someone else. Maybe our gardens- that wanted that rain.

That's an even weirder concept in a way. That maybe good fortune to one person is balanced out with bad fortune for someone else. I don't really believe that though- outside of economics. I suspect it is all chance.

I think more cynical/ pessimistic people maybe do notice bad fortune more though. Optimists will maybe just say: 'That's life' whereas pessimists might insist that this kind of stuff only happens to them.

The other interesting one is that bad things come in 3's. My family were a fan of that one. Not a great sentiment either because, after the 2nd misfortune, I'm so paranoid waiting around for the 3rd.

 

[EmptyBottle]

Excellent explanation, confirmation bias and pessimism does make Murphy's Law slightly self fulfilling. I think I find myself more logical (maybe slightly optimistic too) than optimistic or pessimistic... eg "hopefully A happens, but if B happens I'm partially prepared".

And also "It's quite unlikely Z (worst case scenario) occurs, tho it's infeasible to prepare for it, anyway...".

I was also a bit too indirect with the last line, I meant to refer to people saying X CTB method is guaranteed... I also mentioned the chain of causality briefly. Eg the chain starts with "decide on X, buy X, and do X", but any of those 3 steps might not run.

(If I was too specific, I thought I'd get a counter argument, but Murphy's law meant being too vague was also not the best idea)

 

[Eriktf]

always plan for the unsuspected