Explain SMBC — the wiki for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

The Joke

The comic presents "Apology Cards Sorted by Discipline," showing how practitioners of different academic fields might apologize — each using the reasoning of their discipline to avoid actually taking responsibility.

• Physics: "If the universe is deterministic, it's not my fault. If the universe has random outcomes, I couldn't have predicted that my behavior would upset you."
• Chemistry: "Given that my mistake was only 1 ppm of our relationship, I think it can safely be ignored."
• Biology: "Listen, if you wanted perfection, you shouldn't have dated someone with 3.4 billion years of evolutionary history."
• Psychology: "According to a survey of twenty white college students, you shouldn't still be mad at me. Therefore, it is fact."
• Economics: "Reality always achieves instant equilibrium, so you're not even mad any more."
• Philosophy: "I'm going to need you to prove 'emotion' is a meaningful category before I believe you are upset."

The Humor

Each apology card weaponizes the assumptions, methods, or blind spots of its respective discipline to deflect blame. The physics card exploits the determinism-vs-randomness debate to create a no-win scenario where the apologizer is never at fault regardless of which model of the universe is correct. The chemistry card uses parts-per-million measurement to trivialize the offense. The biology card blames evolution for personal failings. The psychology card satirizes the field's well-known over-reliance on studies using WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) populations — specifically undergraduate psychology students. The economics card mocks the assumption of instant market equilibrium by applying it to emotions. The philosophy card attacks the very premise of being upset by demanding epistemological proof that emotions exist as a category.

The overall joke is that deep expertise in any field can become a tool for sophisticated excuse-making, and that academic reasoning, taken to its logical extreme, can be used to justify almost anything — including refusing to apologize.

References

• Determinism vs. indeterminism: A longstanding debate in physics about whether the universe operates according to fixed laws (making all events predetermined) or includes genuinely random elements (as suggested by quantum mechanics).
• Parts per million (ppm): A unit of measurement used in chemistry to express very dilute concentrations.
• WEIRD subjects in psychology: A well-documented critique that many psychology studies draw their subjects disproportionately from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic societies — and particularly from college undergraduates — limiting the generalizability of their findings.
• Efficient market hypothesis / equilibrium: Economic models often assume that markets (and by extension, systems) quickly reach equilibrium states, a simplifying assumption frequently criticized as unrealistic.