Lessons
Lessons from the cartoons: laws, effects, and history.
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Law
Murphy’s Law
If a job can be done in more than one way, and one of those ways causes a failure, someone will eventually do it that way, so design and check as if they will.
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Effect
Survivorship bias
If you only study the cases that made it back, the planes that landed, the companies still standing, the reviews that got written, you can mistake missing evidence for evidence of safety or success.
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Effect
The Dunning–Kruger effect
People who are weak at a skill often cannot see how weak they are, because the same knowledge that would improve their performance is also what they would need in order to judge it.
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History
The Great Molasses Flood
On 15 January 1919 a poorly built molasses tank in Boston’s North End burst, killed 21 people, and showed what happens when warnings are painted over instead of fixed.
