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 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.
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