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Hanlon's Razor
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Hanlon's Razor /prov./ A corollary of Finagle's Law,
similar to Occam's Razor, that reads "Never attribute to malice
that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." The
derivation of the Hanlon eponym is not definitely known, but a very
similar remark ("You have attributed conditions to villainy that
simply result from stupidity.") appears in "Logic of Empire",
a 1941 story by Robert A. Heinlein, who calls it the `devil theory'
of sociology. Heinlein's popularity in the hacker culture makes
plausible the supposition that `Hanlon' is derived from `Heinlein'
by phonetic corruption. A similar epigram has been attributed to
William James, but Heinlein more probably got the idea from Alfred
Korzybski and other practitioners of General Semantics. Quoted
here because it seems to be a particular favorite of hackers, often
showing up in sig blocks, fortune cookie files and the
login banners of BBS systems and commercial networks. This
probably reflects the hacker's daily experience of environments
created by well-intentioned but short-sighted people. Compare
Sturgeon's Law.
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