Sunday, February 23, 2014

Damn You, Bonaparte!!

"Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence."
—Napoleon Bonaparte

Damn. It turns out Napolean formulated Leff's Fourth Law a couple hundred years earlier than I did. What's more, he stated it more eloquently than I did, and he wasn't even a native English speaker!

3 comments:

  1. It's quite commonly quoted, but not Napoleon. Hanlon's razor

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  2. Matt, thanks for posting, it's good to know the most common attribution!

    But as I unwittingly demonstrated (and that same Wikidedia entry confirms), multiple people often arrive at the same conclusion, and Napoleon seems to have said this a couple of centuries before computer geeks concocted Hanlon's Razor - which, in turn, beat me out by 23 years!

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  3. The Napoleon attribution as been added to that wikipedia page before. It gets removed because there is no citation. You will not be able to find a citation either.

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