Murphy's Law as applied to everyday life

[petrushka.googol]

1. Murphy's Law states that "if something must go wrong it will...".

 

2. We make mistakes in life....(from 1)

 

3. We live we learn (from our mistakes as per 2)

 

4. This makes us wise...and more importantly we must be alive for this to happen (as per 3).

 

So making mistakes is not so bad after all....(from 1/2/3/4)

 

Seems like Schrodinger's cat is predictable in the above example...

 

 

[TheGeckomancer]

First of all this isn't a law, it's an observation that usually holds true. Secondly. You are applying right and wrong arbitrarily. In the case of schrondingers cat the experiment going wrong would the cat simply not being there when you opened the box, alive or dead. Thirdly, it's not even a very solid observation because it generates INSANE amounts of confirmation bias. If you are looking for the things that go wrong you will find them. And the ability to make a positive from a negative does not make the initial thing positive. It just makes you resilient in the face of setbacks.

[Sensei]

1. Murphy's Law states that "if something must go wrong it will...".

 

2. We make mistakes in life....(from 1)

 

3. We live we learn (from our mistakes as per 2)

 

4. This makes us wise...and more importantly we must be alive for this to happen (as per 3).

 

So making mistakes is not so bad after all....(from 1/2/3/4)

As long as mistakes are quite insignificant. Huge mistake ends up in death. And inability to spread gens for further generations.

Take for example motorcycle riders, and base jumpers..

If somebody is addicted to adrenaline (or does not feel natural fear, or have issues with predicting future of his/her actions etc.) because of mutation in genes, might not survive to spread this mutation further.

 

Intelligent people learn on other people mistakes. Even after their death.

 

Seems like Schrodinger's cat is predictable in the above example...

Nonsense..

Original version of it, is about inability to predict whether unstable particle will decay or not, and when it will happen. It's about randomness in quantum world.

Later with additional (unnecessarily) introduction of consciousness (making it even less scientific).

Device measuring decays f.e. does not have any consciousness..

Edited December 4, 2015 by Sensei

[andrewcellini]

1. Murphy's Law

that's just an old saying, and it implies that the situation has a will and desires, specifically the desire to go wrong and annoy us. it has no relation to nature.

 

probably not a good first proposition.

Edited December 4, 2015 by andrewcellini

[Strange]

1. Murphy's Law states that "if something must go wrong it will...".

 

That is not what it says. After all, your version is trivially true. Murphy's Law is a little simpler than that. It is a good precautionary principle in engineering but, as others have said it isn't a "law".

 

Seems like Schrodinger's cat is predictable in the above example...

 

I don't see how.

[swansont]

1. Murphy's Law states that "if something must go wrong it will...".

 

No, it says if something can go wrong, it will. That's has very different implications. As Strange noted, your version is trivially true.

 

And as others have noted, it's not like this is a law of nature. It's an aphorism, a principle, a pithy observation.

[Phi for All]

Making mistakes isn't really what I'd call part of Murphy's Law (the aphorism). It might be a subset, but I think it would be slightly intellectually dishonest to make an honest mistake but then chalk it up to Murphy. That seems like the opposite of a learning experience.

 

I invoke the Murph when things conspire to go pear-shaped at the same time. One bad thing is hardly a Murphy incident, but when you drop your phone in the dog's water bowl and slip in the huge mess it made and break your arm, the series is usually what makes me think of Murphy.

 

And of course, it's all just confirmation bias. Minor bad things happen all the time, and sometimes we group some under a pattern we claim is governed by that bastard Murphy.

[Prometheus]

Maybe it could be considered as loosely analogous to entropy. Usually there is a narrow spectrum of results we would consider desirable and a great many we would consider undesirable. We might then expect things to go wrong more often than right.

[swansont]

One of my bosses invokes Murphy a lot. My colleagues are in a 24/7/366 operations business, and thinking about Murphy's Law helps change the mindset from "if something goes wrong" to "when something goes wrong" because things will eventually go wrong. Power goes out, equipment breaks, people make mistakes, etc. So that leads you away from doing maintenance or installing patches on a Friday afternoon, for example. Because you don't want to be dealing with an unanticipated problem that you inadvertently caused on a Friday afternoon.

[imatfaal]

One of my bosses invokes Murphy a lot. My colleagues are in a 24/7/366 operations business, and thinking about Murphy's Law helps change the mindset from "if something goes wrong" to "when something goes wrong" because things will eventually go wrong. Power goes out, equipment breaks, people make mistakes, etc. So that leads you away from doing maintenance or installing patches on a Friday afternoon, for example. Because you don't want to be dealing with an unanticipated problem that you inadvertently caused on a Friday afternoon.

 

 

Ditto - my Greek ship-board colleagues need to think in these terms. One problem can be solved by following a simple rote method, two simultaneous problems might / might not be amenable to that form of solution, but multiple cascading problems are often exacerbated by the mindless following of the simple solution to one of the individual problems. The assumption that systems will fail and this will not be at a convenient time is crucial to putting the officers and crew in the right mind set to deal with most eventualities. It leads a team towards being able to act in a crisis rather than merely knowing how to solve a problem