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Hanlon's razor


Hanlon's razor is an aphorism expressed in various ways including "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity," or "Don't assume bad intentions over neglect and misunderstanding." It recommends a way of eliminating unlikely explanations for a phenomenon (a philosophical razor).

As an eponymous law, it may have been named after Robert J. Hanlon. There are also earlier sayings that convey the same idea dating back at least as far as Goethe in 1774.

Inspired by Occam's razor, the aphorism was popularized in this form and under this name by the Jargon File, a glossary of computer programmer slang. In 1990, it appeared in the Jargon File described as a "'murphyism' parallel to Occam's Razor." Later that same year, the Jargon File editors noted lack of knowledge about the term's derivation and the existence of a similar epigram by William James. In 1996, the Jargon File entry on Hanlon's Razor noted the existence of a similar quotation in Robert A. Heinlein's short story "Logic of Empire" (1941), with speculation that Hanlon's Razor might be a corruption of "Heinlein's Razor." (A character in Heinlein's story described the "devil theory" fallacy, explaining, "You have attributed conditions to villainy that simply result from stupidity.")

In 2001, Quentin Stafford-Fraser published two blog entries citing e-mails from one Joseph E. Bigler about how the quotation originally came from Robert J. Hanlon of Scranton, Pennsylvania, as a submission for a book compilation of various jokes related to Murphy's law published in Arthur Bloch's Murphy's Law Book Two: More Reasons Why Things Go Wrong! (1980). Subsequently, in 2002, the Jargon File entry noted the same, though not definitively.

Another similar quotation appears in Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774):


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