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 :)
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 :)
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.