In Folha, Viana deepens debate and opines on ‘Murphy’s Law’
Reproduction of Marcelo Viana’s column in Folha de S. Paulo.
You know the famous Murphy’s Law, “anything that can go wrong, will go wrong”? It was popularized by the book “Murphy’s Law – and Other Reasons Why Everything Goes Wrong”, published in 1977 by writer Arthur Bloch, who attributed it to aerospace engineer Edward Murphy. Bloch also proposed various consequences and variations, such as “in a traffic jam, the other lane always goes faster”.
I confess I’ve never been a big fan. For a start, because this “law” is obviously false. Have you ever thought about all the things that can go wrong on an airplane trip? And yet they are routinely successful. Also, I’ve noticed that in Rio de Janeiro’s dense traffic it’s common for my lane to be the fastest. And even when that doesn’t happen, the law remains false for drivers in the other lane…
Murphy wasn’t a fan either: he was always annoyed to have his name associated with a statement that wasn’t his own. What he actually said, around 1949, was that “if things can go wrong, this guy can go wrong”, referring to one of his assistants. This is more reasonable and consistent with my own experience.
In the second volume of his book, published three years later, Bloch included a related rule, which he called Hanlon’s Razor – in philosophy, a “razor” is a mental tool that eliminates inadequate explanations, simplifying the search for the truth – and with which I identify: “don’t attribute to bad faith what can be explained as stupidity”. The author is said to be Robert J. Hanlon, from Pennsylvania, but I haven’t been able to find out anything about him.
In any case, the idea goes back a long way. In“The Sufferings of Young Werther“, published in 1774, the German poet Goethe already wrote that “misunderstandings and negligence cause more damage in the world than bad faith or malice”. In the same vein, a character in the science fiction novel “Logic of Empire”, published by Robert Heinlein in 1941, complains: “you attribute to villainy conditions that are simply the result of stupidity”. Heinlein reinforced the idea in his 1973 short story “Long Enough to Love”: “never underestimate the power of human stupidity”.
The subject has even been given a kind of philosophical study: the delightful satirical booklet “The Fundamental Laws of Human Stupidity”, published in 1976 by Italian historian and economist Carlo Cipolla. The author argues that the crook, who harms others for his own benefit, is less harmful to society as a whole than the stupid, who harms others without reaping any advantage for himself.
Our ancestors evolved in dangerous environments, where assuming that the other person was trying to harm us was a good survival strategy. In today’s world, cooperation, when feasible, is a much more effective route to success. Hanlon’s Razor invites us to replace our evolutionary impulse with the most likely explanation, making it possible to evaluate other people’s actions more rationally.