total.pardo

from a debate - as i see more and more layers of "staggering incompetence" perpetrated as "work" or in the name thereof, when simple or, rather, plain common sense would suffice.  my position is clear, as a person’s actions approach incompetence, their actions are akin to malice - essentially the need to see others suffer embodied in their display of insufficient capability.

wikipedia reference:

Hanlon’s razor is an adage which reads:

“ Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity. ”

Also worded as:

“ Never assume malice when stupidity will suffice.”

According to Joseph Bigler, the quotation first came from a certain Robert J. Hanlon as a submission for a book compilation of various jokes related to Murphy’s law published in 1980 entitled Murphy’s Law Book Two, More Reasons Why Things Go Wrong.

Bill Clarke claims he wrote it in 1974; he says "Robert Hanlon" is a misspelling of "Robert Heinlein".

A similar quotation appears in Robert A. Heinlein’s 1941 short story Logic of Empire ("You have attributed conditions to villainy that simply result from stupidity"); this was noticed in 1996 (five years before Bigler identified the Robert J. Hanlon citation) and first referenced in version 4.0.0 of the Jargon File,[4] with speculation that Hanlon’s Razor might be a corruption of "Heinlein’s Razor." "Heinlein’s Razor" has since been defined as variations on Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity, but don’t rule out malice. or … but keep your eyes open.[citation needed] A variant, Grey’s Law (influenced, no doubt, by Clarke’s third law), posits "Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice."

remember that the next time you are b-s’ing your way through something or causing some other poor sap an issue at work/home - incompetence is killer.