Sod's law

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Sods law ( Engl. : Sod's law ) is a wisdom that says that if one thing can go wrong, it will go wrong.

The phrase is partly derived from the colloquial term unlucky sod , "an unhappy" or "hapless comrade".

This expression is in the United Kingdom used, while in North America the term Murphy's law is more popular.

Comparison with Murphy's Law

So's law is similar to Murphy's law ("Anything that can go wrong will go wrong") but goes further.

Terms such as “the unhappiness will be tailored to the individual” and “happiness will occur in spite of the actions of the individual” are sometimes given as examples of Sod's law.

Sod's law could be broken down to the formula "swept away by fate".

If one takes these aspects into account, one can speak of an irony of fate here.

Dating back to John Stapp's MX981 project, Murphy's Law is more optimistic than Sod's Law: it was a warning to engineers and team members to be careful and make sure everything that could jeopardize a project was taken into account, rather than chance or that Trust luck.

According to statistician David Hand of Imperial College London , Sod's law is a more extreme version of Murphy's law . While Murphy's law says anything that can go wrong is likely to go wrong, Sod's law says anything will go wrong with the worst possible outcome. Hand suggests that Sod's law is a combination of the law of truly large numbers ( Persi Diaconis and Frederick Mosteller ) and the psychological effect of sample bias .

The former says we should expect things to go wrong now and later. The latter says that we remember the things that go wrong but forget the several moments when nothing goes wrong.

Examples

  • Perhaps this would be a better example of Sod's Law: "If you toss a coin, the more urgent you want tails, the more likely you are to get heads" - Richard Dawkins
  • “Traffic lights turn red when you're in a hurry and a computer crashes when you try to press 'send'” —David Hand
  • "... a composer like Beethoven becomes deaf or a drummer like Rick Allen (Def Leppard) [...] loses his arm" —David Hand

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Partridge, Eric: Dictionary of Catch Phrases . Scarborough House, 1992, ISBN 9781461660408 , p. 278.
  2. ↑ Murphy's laws origin . In: The Desert Wings . Murphy's laws site. March 3, 1978.
  3. ↑ a b c David J. Hand, The Improbability Principle: Why Coincidences, Miracles, and Rare Events Happen Every Day , pages 197-198, Macmillan, 2014, ISBN 0374711399 .
  4. ^ Richard Dawkins: The Magic of Reality: How We Know What's Really True . Simon and Schuster, 2012, ISBN 978-1-4516-9013-2 , p.  222 .

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