A New Law

You’ve probably heard of Murphy’s Law [‘If something can go wrong, it will.’] and the Finagle Factor [tweaking data to make it fit better.] There are other examples, often growing out of a specialized field of knowledge. Parkinson’s Law and the Peter Principle fall into that group.

In the sciences, words such as ‘law’ and ‘factor’ and ‘theory’ have precise meanings. You can find them in any decent dictionary. But in common usage, a law is thought of as something which is proven while a theory is still open to question. Using the common definition, laws such as Murphy’s are really theories. No one to date has come up with a formal proof for any one of them. We may suspect they’re true, but we simply can’t be sure. We've no firm proof.

I’ve stumbled [breaking my toe in the process] on a new law which sums up much of the pioneering work of Murphy, Finagle and several others. My debt to them is great. As Newton said, ‘If I have seen farther than others, it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants.’ I call it the Law of Maximization of Misery for short. Here it is in its complete form:

"Events will conspire to produce a maximum of misery for the individual(s) at their focal point."

If you’ve been following this, you’re asking, ‘So where’s the proof?’ I’m going to take a page from Einstein here and make use of a ‘thought’ experiment. Here we go!

[begin thought experiment]

You have a key ring with two keys. They look so much alike that in dim light you can’t tell them apart. One opens your front door and the other doesn’t. You come home at night, take out the key ring and select a key to open the door.

Now, you know just as well as I do that you’ll select the wrong key first more often than not. This is especially true when it’s raining or when you have your arms full of packages or when you can hear the telephone ringing. If all three are happening at the same time, chances are you'll not only select the wrong key but you'll also drop the key ring [prediction based on Murphy's 'Law'.]

If you have a scientific bent, it won’t take you long to try and see if the wrong key choice really occurs more of the time than chance would dictate. You begin carrying a piece of paper and a pencil with you. You jot down which key you choose each time you try to unlock the door. After a decent length of time, say six months or so, you tally the data. Sure enough, you find that you’ve been choosing the ‘right’ key about half the time after all, within the normal statistical limits of uncertainty.

[end thought experiment]

Let’s review the experiment. Remember, the Law states that events will maximize your misery. It's important to fix this concept firmly in mind as we consider the results of the experiment.

Before you started keeping track of the choices you were picking the wrong key more often than chance would permit. Your misery was maximized, in full accordance with the Law.

Here comes the tricky part [really, a 'key' part] of the proof. In the second step, when you carefully recorded your choices, you knew, a priori, that the statistics of an even choice were being violated before you started collecting the data. But when you recorded the data and examined it, you found you couldn't prove it. Your misery was again maximized, just as the Law requires!

We can extract another conclusion from the experiment: making an attempt to prove [or to disprove] the Law of Maximization of Misery shall, after a review of the data, prove the Law of Maximization of Misery. This byproduct of our little thought experiment probably falls into the category of the Law of Unintended Consequences.

Quod erat demonstrandum.

Sidebar: In the first part of the experiment, the Law forces you to pick the wrong key more of the time, but not all of the time. If you picked the wrong key all the time, you would adopt a reverse strategy and open the door with the unpicked key. Misery would not be maximized under such conditions, and a violation of the law would be created. There's more than a whiff of Zen about an unpicked key, however. The concept of an un-chosen key, on analysis, falls outside the limits of this paper.

Sidebar to sidebar: If you're a game enthusiast [as opposed to gaming enthusiast], you might find a chuckle in the 'reverse' nature of the 'proof' of the Law and the wordplay of misery/miseré. It's suggested in the above comment. Wheels within wheels.