Chisholm’s Laws of Human Interaction
1. If anything can go wrong, it will.
2. When things are going well, something will go wrong.
3. Purposes as understood by the purposer will be judged otherwise by others.
Chisholm’s First Law is the same as Murphy’s Law but was discovered independently by Francis P. Chisholm, a professor of English at Wisconsin State College in River Falls, who described it in a paper ‘The Chisholm Effect’, originally published in Motive and introduced to a larger audience through inclusion in A Stress Analysis of A Strapless Evening Gown And Other Essays For A Scientific Age (Robert A. Baker ed. 1963).
Professor Chisholm was inspired to develop his three laws by reports in early 1958 in Astounding Science Fiction of the frequent appearance in scientific labs and engineering contexts of the Finagle Factor and Diddle Constant. Said Chisholm:
“No matter how carefully an experiment was set up something always went wrong, usually in precisely the operation which could not go wrong. The difference between expected and achieved results could in fact be expressed in an exact relation called the Snafu equation involving the Finagle constants.”
Generalising from these mostly pseudonymous reports, Chisholm produced his three laws complete with corollaries. Thus we have the set of laws in full panoply as revealed to the world by their discoverer:
Chisholm’s First Law of Human Interaction. If anything can go wrong, it will.
Corollary: If anything just can’t go wrong, it will anyway.
Chisholm’s Second Law of Human Interaction. When things are going well, something will go wrong.
First Corollary: When things just can’t get any worse, they will.
Second Corollary: Anytime things appear to be going better, you have overlooked something.
Chisholm’s Third Law of Human Interaction. Purposes as understood by the purposer will be misunderstood by others.
First Corollary: If you explain so clearly that nobody can misunderstand, somebody will.
Second Corollary: If you do something which you are sure will meet everybody’s approval, somebody won’t like it.
Third Corollary: Procedures devised to implement the purpose won’t quite work.
The Third Corollary to the Third Law closes the circle, as Professor Chisholm noted, by referring back to the First Law.
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