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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 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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