[thelist] <tip>The New Hacker's Dictionary</tip>

rudy limeback r937 at interlog.com
Sat Jul 15 11:38:00 CDT 2000


Hanlon's Razor --

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 classic 1941 SF
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, Ninety-Ninety Rule.

<tip>
The New Hacker's Dictionary
http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/jargon.html
</tip>


rudy.limeback
r937.com
evolt.org






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