Murphy's Law

Even when works of many dedicated, hardworking and really smart statisticians say that there's a really minute chance of an event happening, that event almost always happen. Or so it seems. Well, the famous murphy's law has been busted by Mythbusters, haven't it? So what makes murphy's law so endearing to most people? I see it this way:

When everything goes according to stats, you/me/everyone will most likely treat it as a normal occurrence and pay a normal amount of attention on it. After a few days, weeks, months... that occurrence will simply be eased from our memories to clear up spaces for more normal occurrences. What people usually remember, for a really long time are the anomalies. i.e. events when murphy's law strike. These are usually traumatic events like going all in with ACE pair only to be beaten by someone with 8 3 offsuit without even seeing the flop. These get ingrained in the memories and being really interesting stories, are retold, reiterated and refined many times over. After a few cycles, they become long lasting memories together with other ML events. If you live long enough, engaged in a little socialising, you should have gathered enough ML stories to share and when such stories are traded, everyone gets the illusion that ML events are occurring everywhere. When in actual fact, life is still very well predicted by simple and boring statistics.

The most superstitious people are gamblers. The very gist of gambling is the excitement of beating the odds. Luck is an over-rated factor here. If anyone can quantify luck, please contact me, I would love to meet you. So when weird events happen at a gambling table, superstitious ideas and really weird suggestions appear to be the most obvious thing to do. Some times, high stakes are even more powerful than intoxicants like alcohol. Don't you just love gambling.