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murphy_s_law_bias
The tendency to overestimate the likelihood that things will go wrong, based on the folk wisdom 'anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.' People selectively remember and attend to negative outcomes while underweighting the many times things went smoothly. This creates a pessimistic distortion of reality that feels validated by experience.
A commuter believes they always hit red lights when they're running late, but doesn't notice the many times they hit green lights when on time. The emotional salience of frustrating delays creates a biased sample in memory.
A software developer is convinced that production systems always crash during his on-call shifts, leading him to dread being on rotation. In reality, incidents are distributed fairly evenly among the team, but the stressful outages during his shifts are far more memorable than the uneventful ones.
A first-time homebuyer is certain that her offer will fall through because 'things never work out when it really matters.' She recalls several past disappointments vividly while discounting the many times important plans did succeed, reinforcing a skewed sense that bad outcomes are her personal norm.
Binary (yes/no) questions an LLM must answer to identify this aspect:
Is a decision being judged by its result rather than the reasoning behind it?
Type: binaryWould a bad outcome from a sound decision process be used to condemn the decision?
Type: binaryIs a lucky outcome being used to validate a poorly reasoned decision?
Type: binaryThe tendency to overestimate the likelihood that things will go wrong, based on the folk wisdom 'anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.' People selectively remember and attend to negative outcomes while underweighting the many times things went smoothly. This creates a pessimistic distortion of reality that feels validated by experience.
Negative events are more emotionally arousing and memorable than neutral or positive ones (negativity bias). Combined with selective attention and confirmation bias, this creates a feedback loop where negative expectations are constantly 'confirmed.'
Track outcomes systematically rather than relying on memory. Keep a log of both positive and negative events to get an accurate picture of actual frequencies.
This bias affects project planning (excessive contingency), engineering design (over-engineering), and everyday decision-making. It can lead to both helpful caution and unhelpful anxiety and pessimism.
Use these tools to detect, analyze, or train this aspect.