Scientific Definition
Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.
Plain-English Definition
Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.
Feynman Explanation
Hope is not a strategy. Neither is Murphy's Law, but it is more accurate.
Core Principle
Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.
Mechanisms
Pending editorial review.
Anything that can go wrong will go wrong.
Pending editorial review.
Pending editorial review.
Pending editorial review.
Pending editorial review.
Contingency planning is not pessimism; it is realism.
Inputs (Triggers)
Pending editorial review.
Outputs (Behaviors)
Pending editorial review.
Behavioral Signature
Hope is not a strategy. Neither is Murphy's Law, but it is more accurate.
Examples
- The demo fails in front of the most important prospect.
- Contingency planning is not pessimism; it is realism.
Pending editorial review.
Famous Experiments
Pending editorial review.
Design Principles
- Plan for failure modes and rehearse responses.
Measurement Approaches
Pending editorial review.
Evidence
Pending editorial review.
Pending editorial review.
The Perverse Incentive Lens™
How this behavior is exploited — and how to redesign around it.
- Plan for failure modes and rehearse responses.
Pending editorial review.
Pending editorial review.
Interactive Mini Network
Click any neighbor to re-center the graph and follow the threads of connection.
Knowledge Graph Neighbors
Auto-linked to the rest of the Human Behavior Taxonomy by family, domain, dimension, and shared keywords.
Ignoring general statistics in favor of specific, vivid information.
Posterior = (likelihood × prior) / evidence.
Update beliefs in proportion to the strength of new evidence.
Start with a prior; update with new evidence.
Novices experiencing early success, often due to variance and small samples.
High-impact, hard-to-predict, retrospectively explainable events.
Striking pattern that is statistically expected in large samples.
Reasoning in distributions — ranges and probabilities — rather than points.
Average outcomes across the population differ from outcomes across time for one person.
A rough calculation using order-of-magnitude reasoning.
In quantum mechanics, certain pairs of properties cannot both be precisely known.
We ignore sample size when judging probability.