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.

The origin of this adage is unknown. 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.

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".

The aphorism 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." 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.

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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."

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