Talk:Yhprum's law

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Origins[edit]

Owing to a translation(?) error when the article was imported from the German wiki in 2006, this article has for several years given the false impression that Yhprum's law was coined by Richard Zeckhauser. However, the earliest available online sources that refer to this law appear to attribute it to a 9 December 1974 column by Alan Abelson in Barron's:

"News and Notes of AIChE" (April 1975). Chemical Engineering Progress 71 (4). "Thanks to the Barron's of December 9, we have come up with Yhprum's Law. As Alan Abelson, the columnist, explains it. Yhprum is Murphy spelled backwards, and his law is the converse of Murphy's; viz.: "Anything that should go wrong won't." We thought your life wouldn't be complete without it. F.J.V.A." (Google snippet)
Robert W. Murphy (May 1975). "New Fiduciary Responsibilities Under the Pension Reform Act of 1974". Proceedings of the Seminar on the Analysis of Security Prices 20 (1): 73-112. "Barron's recently suggested a converse of Murphy's law which they labeled Yhprum's law. Yhprum is "Murphy" spelled backwards and Yhprum's law, invented by another Irishman by the name of Finn Eigel, reads "When everything should go wrong, it probably won't." (Google snippet)

Unfortunately, there are now several post-2006 sources that ascribe the origin of this law to Zeckhauser having blindly copied the error from this article. -- 92.4.191.178 (talk) 18:19, 20 November 2012 (UTC)[reply]

I updated the article with those sources several years ago but failed to note it here. It is quite possible, of course, that Zeckhauser coined the phrase independently. That is especially likely as Abelson's and Zeckhauser's versions of the adage are quite different, both in form and meaning. SpinningSpark 09:27, 26 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]