Hanlon's razor
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Hanlon's razor, a corollary of Finagle's law, is an adage which reads: Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity. Also worded as: Never assume malice when stupidity will suffice.
A similar epigram has been attributed to William James among others.
According to Joseph Bigler the quote first came from a certain Robert J. Hanlon as a submission for a book compilation of various jokes related to Murphy's law published in 1980 entitled Murphy's Law Book Two, More Reasons Why Things Go Wrong (ISBN 0-417-06450-0).
A similar quote appears in Robert A. 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".
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." Albert Einstein also believed in the power of stupidity: "Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former." Compare Schiller's "Against stupidity, the gods themselves contend in vain." Similarly, Elbert Hubbard said, "Genius may have its limitations, but stupidity is not thus handicapped."
Hanlon's Razor is a favorite of hackers, often showing up in sig blocks, fortune files, and the login banners of BBS systems and commercial networks.
This quote (in the form "Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by ignorance or stupidity") has also been attributed to Isaac Asimov in an advocacy document by the Center for Gifted Education.
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[edit] Cock-up theory
A common (and more laconic) British English version, coined by Sir Bernard Ingham, is the saying cock-up before conspiracy. The full quote given by Sir Bernard is "Many journalists have fallen for the conspiracy theory of government. I do assure you that they would produce more accurate work if they adhered to the cock-up theory."[1]
[edit] Other developments
A maxim combining Hanlon's Razor and Clarke's Third Law was coined in 2002 by Vernon Schryver in a discussion on the newsgroup news.admin.net-abuse.email: "[Any] sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice."[2] This spread slowly until it was popularized by writer Avedon Carol in the wake of Hurricane Katrina [3]. This has also been called "Napoleon-Clarke's Law" in the belief that Hanlon's Razor was coined by Napoleon.
[edit] See also
- Finagle's law
- List of adages named after people
- Murphy's law
- Occam's Razor
- Sod's law
- Sturgeon's law
- There Is No Cabal
- Peter Principle
[edit] External links
- AssumeStupidityNotMalice - from MeatballWiki
- Jargon File entry for "Hanlon's Razor"
- Joseph E. Bigler claims that Robert J. Hanlon was a real person and did indeed invent this quote. This is followed up by a later note which leads us to Murphy's Law Book Two, More Reasons Why Things Go Wrong (ISBN 0-417-06450-0); not to be confused with Murphy's Law #2 (ISBN 0-8431-0674-3). Note that publisher of these books, Price Stern Sloan, was acquired by Putnam Berkley Group (history) in 1993.
