6 ms·

I think people interpret Murphy's law incorrectly most of the time. We can extrapolate from "Anything bad that can, happen will happen", and get the statement:

I think people interpret Murphy's law incorrectly most of the time. We can extrapolate from "Anything bad that can, happen will happen", and get the statement: "If something can physically happen, given enough time, it will eventually happen." I like to think its sort of a very tangential sister idea of the mediocrity theory.

dahart 8y ago
I'm not sure I understand what you think is incorrect; your explanation seems to align with the common interpretation. Here's the article I was thinking of. Totally worth the read, aside from discussion of Murphy's Law... https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1998/03/the-lessons-of-valujet-592/306534/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1998/03/the-les... "Keep in mind that it is also competitive, and that if one of its purposes is to make money, the other is to move the public through thin air cheaply and at high speed. Safety is never first, and it never will be, but for obvious reasons it is a necessary part of the venture. Risk is a part too, but on the everyday level of practical compromises and small decisions—the building blocks of this ambitious enterprise—the view of risk is usually obscured. The people involved do not consciously trade safety for money or convenience, but they inevitably make a lot of bad little choices. They get away with those choices because, as Perrow says, Murphy's Law is wrong—what can go wrong usually goes right. But then one day a few of the bad little choices come together, and circumstances take an airplane down. Who, then, is really to blame?" Of course, regardless of which way you interpret Murphy's law, the law itself and this alternative are both hyperbolic exaggerations. The main question is more of which way of looking at it is more useful. In terms of thinking about safety, it seems like both points of view have something important to say about why paying attention to unlikely events is critical.
- 0_gravitas 8y ago
  I suppose what I generally mean is that most of the people that I've talked to only consider it within the scope of "what can go wrong", and seem to never consider the more general statement. I'm certainly not claiming to be the first person to think such a way, if that's the impression I gave off. Murphy's law is a favorite of mine because it's the perfect driving board for conversations about infinite probabilities and aliens and simulation stuff.
  - dahart 8y ago
    I guess I still don't know exactly what the more general statement is you're referring to. Do you mean just that a non-zero probability of a single event happening equals 100% probability given a large enough sample of events (which may take a large amount of time)? I feel like Murphy's law as stated captures that idea adequately. And it's certainly true if the event probability really is non-zero. Sometimes, though, we can calculate event probabilities that are apparently non-zero based on known information, but are zero in reality. One example in my head is quantum tunneling. Maybe this is along the lines you're talking about? And this is the way my physics TA described it many years ago, but caveat I'm not a physicist and I suspect there are some problems with this analogy. He said you can calculate the probability of an atom spontaneously appearing on the other side of a solid wall, and you can calculate the same (less likely) probability of two atoms going together, therefore there is a non-zero probability that a human can teleport whole through the wall. The odds are too small to expect to ever see it, but on the other hand, with the amount of matter in the universe we should expect to see small scale examples somewhat often, and we don't. There may be unknown reasons that the probability of an event is zero.
    - 0_gravitas 8y ago
      It looks like we agree on all points, yes

dahart 8y ago

I'm not sure I understand what you think is incorrect; your explanation seems to align with the common interpretation. Here's the article I was thinking of. Totally worth the read, aside from discussion of Murphy's Law... https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1998/03/the-lessons-of-valujet-592/306534/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1998/03/the-les... "Keep in mind that it is also competitive, and that if one of its purposes is to make money, the other is to move the public through thin air cheaply and at high speed. Safety is never first, and it never will be, but for obvious reasons it is a necessary part of the venture. Risk is a part too, but on the everyday level of practical compromises and small decisions—the building blocks of this ambitious enterprise—the view of risk is usually obscured. The people involved do not consciously trade safety for money or convenience, but they inevitably make a lot of bad little choices. They get away with those choices because, as Perrow says, Murphy's Law is wrong—what can go wrong usually goes right. But then one day a few of the bad little choices come together, and circumstances take an airplane down. Who, then, is really to blame?" Of course, regardless of which way you interpret Murphy's law, the law itself and this alternative are both hyperbolic exaggerations. The main question is more of which way of looking at it is more useful. In terms of thinking about safety, it seems like both points of view have something important to say about why paying attention to unlikely events is critical.

0_gravitas 8y ago
I suppose what I generally mean is that most of the people that I've talked to only consider it within the scope of "what can go wrong", and seem to never consider the more general statement. I'm certainly not claiming to be the first person to think such a way, if that's the impression I gave off. Murphy's law is a favorite of mine because it's the perfect driving board for conversations about infinite probabilities and aliens and simulation stuff.
- dahart 8y ago
  I guess I still don't know exactly what the more general statement is you're referring to. Do you mean just that a non-zero probability of a single event happening equals 100% probability given a large enough sample of events (which may take a large amount of time)? I feel like Murphy's law as stated captures that idea adequately. And it's certainly true if the event probability really is non-zero. Sometimes, though, we can calculate event probabilities that are apparently non-zero based on known information, but are zero in reality. One example in my head is quantum tunneling. Maybe this is along the lines you're talking about? And this is the way my physics TA described it many years ago, but caveat I'm not a physicist and I suspect there are some problems with this analogy. He said you can calculate the probability of an atom spontaneously appearing on the other side of a solid wall, and you can calculate the same (less likely) probability of two atoms going together, therefore there is a non-zero probability that a human can teleport whole through the wall. The odds are too small to expect to ever see it, but on the other hand, with the amount of matter in the universe we should expect to see small scale examples somewhat often, and we don't. There may be unknown reasons that the probability of an event is zero.
  - 0_gravitas 8y ago
    It looks like we agree on all points, yes