The Best Tips For Successfully Dealing With Murphy's Law
How to make things right when everything seems wrong
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A 3-minute read
Q. Lewis, tell me about Murphy’s Law and how to deal with the challenges it poses?
A. As a problem-solving-fixer-troubleshooter one of the factors I need to be prepared for in my daily life is Murphy’s Law, more commonly known by social scientists as Black Swan Events. Murphy’s Law is an adage or epigram that is typically stated as: “Anything that can go wrong will go wrong”.
History
Black Swan Events are a way to make some sense out of Murphy’s Law. According to the latter, it can be stated that anything that can go wrong anywhere does go wrong sooner or later.
Knowing this, any skilled problem-solver or engineer knows that planning for this eventual failure must be taken into consideration when building anything.
Sufficient stress can hardly be laid on the advantages of simplicity. The human factor cannot be safely neglected in planning machinery. If attention is to be obtained, the engine must be such that the engineer will be disposed to attend to it.
Mathematician Augustus De Morgan wrote on June 23, 1866;
“The first experiment already illustrates a truth of the theory, well confirmed by practice, what-ever can happen will happen if we make trials enough.”
In 1948, humorist Paul Jennings coined the term resistentialism, a jocular play on resistance and existentialism, to describe “seemingly spiteful behavior manifested by inanimate objects”, where objects that cause problems (like lost keys or a runaway bouncy ball) are said to exhibit a high degree of malice toward humans.
With Murphy’s Law in mind, the Black Swan Theory or Theory of Black Swan Events takes Murphy’s Law to an entirely new level. Here it is said as a metaphor that describes an event that comes as a surprise, has a major effect, and is often inappropriately rationalized after the fact with the benefit of hindsight. The term is based on an ancient saying that presumed black swans did not exist — a saying that became reinterpreted to teach a different lesson after the first European encounter with them.
The theory was developed by social scientist Nassim Nicholas Taleb to explain:
The psychological biases that blind people, both individually and collectively, to uncertainty and to a rare event’s massive role in historical affairs.
The disproportionate role of high-profile, hard-to-predict, and rare events that are beyond the realm of normal expectations in history, science, finance, and technology.
Unexpected events of large magnitude and consequence and their dominant role in history. Such events, considered extreme outliers, collectively play vastly larger roles than regular occurrences. More technically, in the scientific monograph “Silent Risk”, Taleb mathematically defines the black swan problem as “stemming from the use of degenerate metaprobability”.
The non-computability of the probability of consequential rare events using scientific methods (owing to the very nature of small probabilities).
When the phrase was coined, the black swan was presumed not to exist. The importance of the metaphor lies in its analogy to the fragility of any system of thought. A set of conclusions is potentially undone once any of its fundamental postulates is disproved. In this case, the observation of a single black swan would be the undoing of the logic of any system of thought, as well as any reasoning that followed from that underlying logic.
The phrase “black swan” derives from a Latin expression; its oldest known occurrence is from the 2nd-century Roman poet Juvenal’s characterization in his Satire VI of something being “rara avis in terris nigroque simillima cygno” (“a rare bird in the lands and very much like a black swan).
Takeaway
Black swan events were discussed by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his 2001 book Fooled By Randomness, which concerned financial events. His 2007 book The Black Swan extended the metaphor to events outside of financial markets. Taleb regards almost all major scientific discoveries, historical events, and artistic accomplishments as “black swans” — undirected and unpredicted. He gives the rise of the Internet, the personal computer, World War I, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and the September 11, 2001 attacks as examples of black swan events. The GameStop stock market frenzy would also fit under the category of a Black Swan Event.
Author: Lewis Harrison is a serial entrepreneur, writer, teacher, public speaker, and seminar leader. He focuses on problem-solving, self-improvement, personal development, and sharing love with the world. He offers courses and private mentoring and coaching for those seeking a more meaningful life, motivated by self-improvement and personal development.
“I have a bottomless passion for the application of game theory in decision-making. I am always exploring trends, areas of interest, and solutions to build new stories upon. Again, if you have any ideas, you would like me to write about just email me at LewisCoaches@gmail.com.”
……………..Lewis
A Final Thought
To be able to achieve our full potential, we need to know how to distinguish between actual and ideas born of cognitive bias, fear, and intentional ignorance. We all are seeking love and also searching for ways to connect. The clearer our thinking, and the greater our ability to negotiate, the more likely this will happen. I offer many Substack stories that explore simple ways to stay data-informed and to develop a more meaningful, healthier, and more productive life. Please subscribe at Asklewis.Substack.com