"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!
It's quite commonly quoted, but not Napoleon. Hanlon's razor
ReplyDeleteMatt, thanks for posting, it's good to know the most common attribution!
ReplyDeleteBut 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!
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.
ReplyDelete