sabato 6 marzo 2010

The Law of Unintended Consequences

Proposition
"Assume you are not omniscient. Then, any of your interventions in a complex system may or may not have the intended result, but will inevitably create unanticipated and often undesirable outcomes"


Proof
The first part of the Law is immediate: an intervention either has its intended result or it has not, tertium non datur.
For the inevitability of unanticipated outcomes, apply the definition of complex system by Whitesides and Ismagilov.
For the fact that undesirable outcomes are more likely than any other type of outcome, apply Murphy's Law.
QED