Even More Useful Maxims
This is my third group of the many short principles that help clarify reasoning, decision-making, or analysis. I am featuring some of them in a series of posts, expositing a few of them each time. I make no apologies for the m-pirie-cism that pervades them.
7. Sagan’s Standard concerns itself with extraordinary claims.
Carl Sagan postulated in his writing and his TV show that ‘extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.’ This is sometimes abbreviated to ECREE. It means that if a claim is made that seems to go far against conventional science or experience, to be taken seriously it must be backed up by rigorous evidence
The idea has a long history, with similar points made by earlier thinkers. The Scottish philosopher, David Hume, in his posthumously published essay on miracles, declared that “No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavours to establish.”
When people propose paranormal phenomena or alien encounters, the critical thinker will opt for an explanation that lies within conventional experience rather than accept the remarkable claim at face value. To gain acceptance, the assertion must be accompanied by evidence such as multiple eye-witnesses, photographs, radar logs, or physical and tangible signs that it happened.
Sagan’s Standard Is similar in its approach to Occam’s Razor, in that it invokes the fundamental principle of scientific skepticism.
8. Goodhart’s Law started as a jocular observation on monetary policy.
The economist Charles Goodhart observed in a 1975 paper on monetarism that whenever a monetary target is set, it ceases to be a good measure. It has since been broadened to cover other areas. The reasoning is that people game the system to their advantage, so that whenever a target is set, they will pursue that target instead of the factor it was set up to measure.
Adam Smith pointed out that the British government's ‘tonnage bounty’ on the white-herring fishery incentivized building larger ships to entrap the bounty rather than the fish. When the mythical Soviet nail factory was rewarded according to the miles of nails it produced, it made only long thin ones. When the target was changed to width of nails, it made only fat ones. And when the target was set as weight of nails, it produced one giant nail weighing several tons.
It is because people game the system that any published target will cease to be an effective measure. When governments pay farmers for rats’ tails, they breed rats. When British India paid bounties for dead cobras, people began to breed cobras. Famously, when schools are measured on the test scores of their pupils, they teach them to pass the test instead of educating them.
If you set a target for something, people will aim at the target rather than what it was set to measure.
9. Murphy’s Law tells us that if anything can go wrong, it will.
It was allegedly coined by Captain Edward Murphy Jr when a technician put him through a life-threatening ride on a rocket sled by installing all the components backwards. It is sometimes called Sod’s Law in the UK, warning us that things usually go wrong at the worst possible time.
My Chemistry teacher at school used an eloquent version of it, saying “The universe opposes what you try to do.” If anything can go wrong, it will. Buttered toast, when dropped, lands with the butter side down. If you write a piece about spelling, there will be a typographical error in your piece. Nothing is as easy as it looks. Everything takes longer than you think.
It is a useful maxim because it warns us to be cautious, to think things through and calculate what might go wrong. It teaches us to investigate possible disasters and to build in measures to prevent them if we can. It paints the ’worst case’ scenario. In business and in politics it is the rock of unintended consequences on which the best-rigged ships founder.
If it can go wrong, it will.
Madsen Pirie