If you observe incidents closely in your life, specially wrong events then you see that if something will not go in a planned way in your life, something will go wrong then we observe that it will become worst day by day and we wonder why is this happening?
The answer comes to this question form the Murphy's Law.
Murphy's Law just reminds us that anything that can possibly happen will eventually happen (including bad stuff). It doesn't really mean we are doomed for failure. If there are 1000 different randomly possibly outcomes then eventually all of them will take place to someone at some time. If some of those outcomes are "bad", and they happen to someone, then that person might think they have been subject to Murphy's Law, but they have actually just experienced one of 1000 outcomes that maybe they didn't happen to want.
It says you should NOT base important decisions on the unlikely chance that a bad thing will happen, but that you should cover all contingencies if possible.
For example, don't play Russian roulette because you like the 5 out of 6 chance that there is no bullet in the chamber. (Not even if there are 1 million chambers and only one bullet). Who knows it might be your last game (Possible right).
You can relate Russian roulette with uncertainty that involves risk. What Warren Buffett says on Russian roulette:
You can see Murphy’s laws in business, manufacturing, software, etc.
For example, don't write crappy software (or any software) and not test it under all possible conditions. Murphy's Law says that one of your customers will find an untested pattern or usage that will cause the product to fail with unknown consequences. These consequences could even be good! (But that's not very likely).
You can relate to Murphy’s law with other domains like thermodynamics.
Second law of thermodynamics.
You can see it in your day to day life, if you buy a new house and the builder promised you 2 years’ time, then in most of the cases it will take more than two years’ time. This is true with most of the real life cases.
We will see some examples below:
Ex 1: Despite the 99.99 percent availability that AWS’s (Amazon Web Services) agreement promises, when you are on the cloud, you must believe in Murphy’s Law,
A company’s cloud architecture needs to be stronger than its weakest link.
How Netflix fix this issue of outage in comparison to other large sites hosted on AWS?
It comes from Murphy's law that Netflix’s have deep faith in Murphy’s Law, and thus Netflix developed a tool called Chaos Monkey.
Chaos Monkey is a tool internally developed at Netflix that comes from the idea of unleashing a wild monkey with a weapon in its data center (or cloud) to randomly “chew through cables” thereby disrupting its system. In simpler words, the Chaos Monkey is a bug deliberately activated into Netflix’s systems that make things go wrong with its service on a regular basis.
Netflix know that something may go wrong anytime, so instead of waiting the wrong to happen, they developed this tool Chaos Monkey, that make wrongs to happen like a virus to the system on a regular basis and Netflix find the solution and fix the wrongs (Bugs), so it will become more stronger than its competitors.
Ex2: Let’s explore the Murphy's law in the world of investing. Recall the law once-
Losing some money is an inevitable part of investing. In fact, there is nothing you can do to prevent it. But to be a sensible and intelligent investor, you must take responsibility for ensuring that you never lose most or all of your money.
Remember Warren Buffett's law of investing:
When i started share market investing and learning, then i don't know about the Murphy's Law and this ignorance cost me a huge penalty. I bought my first share of a construction company ERA INFRA and the company that time was trading at 40rs and its share price dropped form around 150 to 40, so i thought i am buying the share at a huge bargain but that is my stupidity that i did not enquire about the cause of the bargain and why the stock price crashed from 150 to 40 and why i did not ask myself, that if the price come to 40 then it may go to 0 as well, and as a naive investor i kept averaging the share and bought more, finally i averaged the share till it crashed to 7rs and my average price was 16rs.
Another mistake, instead of accepting that the mistake was made, i believed that the stock will turn around and i make a profit and in tis hope i hold the stock for 1 and half year. And in this time i lost many other opportunities and the stock price crashed to near to zero.
If I know Murphy's law that time, i may have rescued myself from the biggest loss of my investing career.
Checkout the Era infra's performance chart:
You can find different versions of Murphy's Laws. Some of them are -
Another example comes from the British time, During that time in Delhi the cobra snack’s numbers were increasing and started creating problems for the public so to solve the problem, the government started incentive program, like bring the cobra snack and get rewarded.
The government thought it may reduce the snack’s problem but in return the people started to breed the cobra snacks to get more reward. Once the government identified this trait, they stopped the reward program.
So, the people stopped breeding the snacks and left them on the road, so the number of snacks increased more than the initially identified numbers of snacks in the problem.
How Murphy's law work?
You're sitting in eight lanes of bumper-to-bumper traffic. You're more than ready to get home, but you notice, to your great dismay, that all of the other lanes seem to be moving. You change lanes. But once you do, the cars in your new lane come to a dead halt. At a standstill, you notice every lane on the highway (including the one you just left) is moving -- except yours.
Welcome to the aggravating world of Murphy's Law. This idiom says that whatever can go wrong will go wrong. And it may just be right. This isn't because of some mysterious power the law possesses. In reality, it's us who give Murphy's Law relevance. When life goes well, little is made of it. After all, we expect that things should work out in our favor. But when things go badly, we look for reasons.
Let's close the post from the wisdom of Nassim Nicholas Taleb form the book The Black Swan. What Taleb tells us on why failures fail more often-?
I hope, you get some ideas on Murphy's Law and you can find out more scenarios in your daily life. Please comment your idea’s in the comment section below.
The answer comes to this question form the Murphy's Law.
"Things will go wrong in any given situation, if you give them a chance” or more commonly, "whatever can go wrong, will go wrong."
Murphy's Law just reminds us that anything that can possibly happen will eventually happen (including bad stuff). It doesn't really mean we are doomed for failure. If there are 1000 different randomly possibly outcomes then eventually all of them will take place to someone at some time. If some of those outcomes are "bad", and they happen to someone, then that person might think they have been subject to Murphy's Law, but they have actually just experienced one of 1000 outcomes that maybe they didn't happen to want.
It says you should NOT base important decisions on the unlikely chance that a bad thing will happen, but that you should cover all contingencies if possible.
For example, don't play Russian roulette because you like the 5 out of 6 chance that there is no bullet in the chamber. (Not even if there are 1 million chambers and only one bullet). Who knows it might be your last game (Possible right).
You can relate Russian roulette with uncertainty that involves risk. What Warren Buffett says on Russian roulette:
Well, we don't know exactly what'll happen. I mean, but if you gave me a six shooter and stuck a gun in— a bullet in one chamber and said spin it and five times out of six nothing bad's going to happen, but we haven't done this before, so we're not sure what's going to happen if the sixth one's pulled. It's just silly to do and we raised the debt ceiling seven times during the Bush administration and now in this administration, they're using it as a hostage and you really don't have any business by playing Russian roulette to get your way in some other matter. We should be more grown up than that.
You can see Murphy’s laws in business, manufacturing, software, etc.
For example, don't write crappy software (or any software) and not test it under all possible conditions. Murphy's Law says that one of your customers will find an untested pattern or usage that will cause the product to fail with unknown consequences. These consequences could even be good! (But that's not very likely).
You can relate to Murphy’s law with other domains like thermodynamics.
Second law of thermodynamics.
"Anything that can increase its entropy, will increase its entropy"
You can see it in your day to day life, if you buy a new house and the builder promised you 2 years’ time, then in most of the cases it will take more than two years’ time. This is true with most of the real life cases.
We will see some examples below:
Ex 1: Despite the 99.99 percent availability that AWS’s (Amazon Web Services) agreement promises, when you are on the cloud, you must believe in Murphy’s Law,
“Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.”
A company’s cloud architecture needs to be stronger than its weakest link.
How Netflix fix this issue of outage in comparison to other large sites hosted on AWS?
It comes from Murphy's law that Netflix’s have deep faith in Murphy’s Law, and thus Netflix developed a tool called Chaos Monkey.
Chaos Monkey is a tool internally developed at Netflix that comes from the idea of unleashing a wild monkey with a weapon in its data center (or cloud) to randomly “chew through cables” thereby disrupting its system. In simpler words, the Chaos Monkey is a bug deliberately activated into Netflix’s systems that make things go wrong with its service on a regular basis.
Netflix know that something may go wrong anytime, so instead of waiting the wrong to happen, they developed this tool Chaos Monkey, that make wrongs to happen like a virus to the system on a regular basis and Netflix find the solution and fix the wrongs (Bugs), so it will become more stronger than its competitors.
Ex2: Let’s explore the Murphy's law in the world of investing. Recall the law once-
It is found that anything that can go wrong generally does go wrong at the worst possible time.This is the reason that almost all accomplished value investors give so much importance to risk control and are always looking out for things that can go wrong.
Losing some money is an inevitable part of investing. In fact, there is nothing you can do to prevent it. But to be a sensible and intelligent investor, you must take responsibility for ensuring that you never lose most or all of your money.
Remember Warren Buffett's law of investing:
Rule No. 1: Never lose money.
Rule No. 2: Never forget rule No. 1.
When i started share market investing and learning, then i don't know about the Murphy's Law and this ignorance cost me a huge penalty. I bought my first share of a construction company ERA INFRA and the company that time was trading at 40rs and its share price dropped form around 150 to 40, so i thought i am buying the share at a huge bargain but that is my stupidity that i did not enquire about the cause of the bargain and why the stock price crashed from 150 to 40 and why i did not ask myself, that if the price come to 40 then it may go to 0 as well, and as a naive investor i kept averaging the share and bought more, finally i averaged the share till it crashed to 7rs and my average price was 16rs.
Another mistake, instead of accepting that the mistake was made, i believed that the stock will turn around and i make a profit and in tis hope i hold the stock for 1 and half year. And in this time i lost many other opportunities and the stock price crashed to near to zero.
If I know Murphy's law that time, i may have rescued myself from the biggest loss of my investing career.
Checkout the Era infra's performance chart:
You can find different versions of Murphy's Laws. Some of them are -
- Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.
- Left to themselves, things tend to go from bad to worse.
- Nothing is as easy as it looks - you can see it in the world, it is a complex adaptive system. Everything depends on another thing but it looks simple from outside.
- Everything takes longer than you think - Any project ( mostly) takes more time than the estimated time, Opera house construction as an example took more than the proposed time.
- If there is a possibility of several things going wrong, the one that will cause the most damage will be the one to go wrong. If there is a worse time for something to go wrong, it will happen then.
A chain is no stronger than its weakest link, and life is after all a chain.William James
- If you perceive that there are four possible ways in which a procedure can go wrong, and circumvent these, then a fifth way, unprepared for, will promptly develop. this is the black swan in term of Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
- If everything seems to be going well, you have obviously overlooked something. This you can term as overconfidence.
- Whenever you set out to do something, something else must be done first.
- Every solution breeds new problems.
Another example comes from the British time, During that time in Delhi the cobra snack’s numbers were increasing and started creating problems for the public so to solve the problem, the government started incentive program, like bring the cobra snack and get rewarded.
The government thought it may reduce the snack’s problem but in return the people started to breed the cobra snacks to get more reward. Once the government identified this trait, they stopped the reward program.
So, the people stopped breeding the snacks and left them on the road, so the number of snacks increased more than the initially identified numbers of snacks in the problem.
How Murphy's law work?
You're sitting in eight lanes of bumper-to-bumper traffic. You're more than ready to get home, but you notice, to your great dismay, that all of the other lanes seem to be moving. You change lanes. But once you do, the cars in your new lane come to a dead halt. At a standstill, you notice every lane on the highway (including the one you just left) is moving -- except yours.
Welcome to the aggravating world of Murphy's Law. This idiom says that whatever can go wrong will go wrong. And it may just be right. This isn't because of some mysterious power the law possesses. In reality, it's us who give Murphy's Law relevance. When life goes well, little is made of it. After all, we expect that things should work out in our favor. But when things go badly, we look for reasons.
Let's close the post from the wisdom of Nassim Nicholas Taleb form the book The Black Swan. What Taleb tells us on why failures fail more often-?
...Failures are also cumulative; losers are likely to also lose in the future, even if we don't take into account, the mechanism of demoralization that might exacerbate it and cause additional failures.
I hope, you get some ideas on Murphy's Law and you can find out more scenarios in your daily life. Please comment your idea’s in the comment section below.
if you are looking more on Murphy's law, do read the book on Murphy's law.
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-Mahesh
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