Finagle's law

Finagle's Law (completely Finagle's Law of Dynamic Negatives ) is a wisdom that makes a statement about sources of error in complex systems:

"Anything that can go wrong, will — at the worst possible moment."

"Everything that can go wrong will go wrong - at the worst possible moment."

It was designed by John W. Campbell Jr. introduced, who varied it again and again in his editorials as editor of astounding science fiction over decades. Larry Niven used Finagle's Law as a running gag in numerous novels about the Belter , a community of miners in the asteroid belt.

Finagle's law is often seen as a modification of Murphy's law : “If something can go wrong, then it will also go wrong - and at the worst possible time.” And Finagle's law according to Hegel's taste , quoted from Friedrich Theodor Vischer , was something like “die Problem of the object ”.

economy

The economic variant of the law is known as the Finagles Information Law :

1. The information you have is not the information you want.
2. The information you want is not the information you need.
3. The information you need is not available to you.
4. The information you can get costs more than you are willing to pay.

Experiments

The following law applies to experiments :

1. If an experiment works, something is wrong.
2. Regardless of the result of an experiment, there will always be someone who can
   1. misinterpreted,
   2. tricky coiffed or
   3. believes it is his favorite theory.
3. In any data collection, the error is where the data is obviously correct and therefore does not need to be checked.
   1. Someone asked for help will not see the error either.
   2. Someone who happens to take a look at it will see the error immediately.

The word to finagle comes from English and means "cheat" or "cheat".

Individual evidence

1. ^ Dorothy P. Rice: The Role of Statistics in the Development of Health Care Policy . In: The American Statistician . August 1977, Vol. 31, No. 3, page 102.