Hanlon's Razor
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A corollary of Finagle's law, Hanlon's Razor reads:
The term's derivation is unknown. A similar epigram has been attributed to William James among others. One possible source is its similarity to Occam's Razor. According to Joseph Bigler (http://www.statusq.org/2001/11/26.html) the quote first came from someone named Robert J. Hanlon as a submission for a book compilation of various jokes related to Murphy's law.
A similar quote appears in Robert Heinlein's 1941 short story Logic of Empire ("You have attributed conditions to villainy that simply result from stupidity"), so some claim Hanlon's Razor is a corruption of "Heinlein's Razor."
The maxim is also widely attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte.
Observations on the sway of human error over malice occur in various works. Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) mentions "...misunderstandings and neglect create more confusion in this world than trickery and malice. At any rate, the last two are certainly much less frequent."
Hanlon's Razor is a favorite of hackers, often showing up in sig blocks, fortune cookie files and the login banners of BBS systems and commercial networks.
A common (and more laconic) British English version is the saying, cock-up before conspiracy. However, Howard Tayler notes this only applies when there is no actual malice (http://www.schlockmercenary.com/d/20021006.html).
Stupidity seems to be the default answer. As the late Frank Zappa observed, "There is more stupidity than hydrogen in the universe, and it has a longer shelf life."
See also
External links
- AssumeStupidityNotMalice - from MeatballWiki
- Jargon File entry for "Hanlon's Razor" (http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/H/Hanlons-Razor.html)fr:Rasoir d'Hanlon