Whats the eponymous law for?

[zed]

something that happens over and over again until you try and observe it and then occurrences of it dry up.

In programming its quite often seen, eg bug X happens 80% of the time during a run through but you ignore it because you're doing something else, eventually you go OK finally I'm gonna fix this bug, but you run the program over and and over again so check the logs to see whats triggering the bug but it doesnt occur until maybe 10 attempts later.

This has been bugging me for years

btw no confirmation bias involved

 

[pcchen]

I think this is probably just probabilities.
For example, if a TV set is prone to some severe malfunction (e.g. automatically turn off) twice every day, then it's quite noticeable because twice every day is not very rare.
However, if you decided to look into the reason behind the malfunction, you may need to wait for several hours for it to happen. For most people, several hours is quite a long time, thus it looks like it "doesn't want to happen" when you want to observe it.