Hanlon's razor

Last year in a Tom Scott video, I heard a law that I had not heard before: Hanlon's razor (Scott, 2023). Tom went on to explain that Hanlon's razor meant "in short: 'cock-up before conspiracy', [or that we] should never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity" (10.45). How fabulous! I couldn't agree more.

But I had the niggling feeling that, even though I was unfamiliar with the term's name, I had a vague recollection of the law itself. A Boolean search for the term worded as Tom had it yielded a Wikipedia entry, but a plain text search found a piece by The Quote Investigator, Garson O'Toole (2016). O'Toole points us to a Heinlein short story, so I searched my Heinlein archive, to find a short about about slavery on Venus. The protagonist, Wingate, asks Doc (who may be the recurring spymaster character, Doc 'Kettlebelly' Baldwin) to read a book he has written:

"Doc accepted the manuscript, read it through, and returned it without comment. But Wingate pressed him for an opinion. 'Well, my boy, if you insist—'

"'I do.'

"'I would say that you have fallen into the commonest fallacy of all in dealing with social and economic subjects — the "devil theory".'

"'Huh?'

"'You have attributed conditions of villainy that simply result from stupidity. Colonial slavery is nothing new; it is the inevitable result of imperial expansion, the automatic result of an antiquated financial structure—,'

"'I pointed out the part the banks played in my book.'

"'No, no, no! You think bankers are scoundrels. They are not. Nor are company officials, nor patrons, nor the governing classes back on Earth. Men are constrained by necessity and build up rationalizations to account for their acts. It is not even cupidity. Slavery is economically unsound, nonproductive, but men drift into it whenever the circumstances compel it. A different financial system - but that's another story.' " (Heinlein, 1951, p. 170-171)

So how did this get to Hanlon's razor? Well, it seems that the phrase "You have attributed conditions of villainy that simply result from stupidity" (Heinlein, 1951, p. 170) got massaged to "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity" (O'Toole, 2016, citing Bloch, 1980, p. 52). Bloch (1980, p. 52) names the law 'Hanlon's Law', but does not mention the person who submitted it. O'Toole explains that it comes from a computer programmer, Robert J. Hanlon (2016, citing Groethe, 2011, p. 96).

Author Dr Mardy Groethe explains the attribution: "there was a very real person behind the quotation, and after discussing it with Hanlon’s widow, Regina, and his son, Robert, I’m happy to tell the story here. For many years, Robert J. Hanlon was a computer programmer at the Tobyhanna Army Depot in Scranton, Pennsylvania. After reading the first Murphy’s Law book, he decided to accept the publisher’s invitation for readers to submit 'laws' of their own creation for a planned sequel. Several months after submitting his creation, he was delighted to learn that his never attribute to malice creation would be appearing in the book. As a 'prize' for his selection, Hanlon ultimately received ten copies of the sequel when it was published in 1980, and there are some friends and family members who still treasure the copies that Hanlon autographed for them. Hanlon was deeply interested in poetry and literature, and would often amaze people with his ability to recite extensive passages from Shakespeare’s works completely from memory. But did he ever read Robert Heinlein’s 'Logic of Empire'? That we will never know" (2011, p. 96).

When I first read that the potential creator of this law was a software engineer, I immediately wondered if Hanlon was a Heinlein fan, and - like Occam’s Razor, a law Heinlein often used in his writing - Hanlon smoothed this fragment of dialogue into a law, and used it in his work. The two laws - Hanlon's and Occam's razors - are "designed to prune sets of hypotheses by favoring simplicity" (O'Toole, 2016), logical tools for any stripe of engineer.

And now I know. 

Sam

References:

Heinlein, R. A. (1951). Logic of Empire. In The Green Hills of Earth (pp. 135-176). Pan Science Fiction. This story was originally published in John F. Campbell's the March 1941 issue of Astounding Science Fiction (pp. 9-44). 

Bloch, A. (Ed). (1980). Murphy’s Law Book Two: More Reasons Why Things Go Wrong. Sloan Publishers, Inc.

Groethe, M. (2011). Neverisms : a quotation lover's guide to things you should never do, never say, or never forget. HarperCollins Publishers.

O'Toole, G. (2016, December 30). Never Attribute to Malice That Which Is Adequately Explained by Stupidity. The Quote Investigator. https://quoteinvestigator.com/2016/12/30/not-malice/

Scott, T. (2023, November 14). Every mistake I've made since 2014 [video]. YouTube. https://youtu.be/lIbfMjZ0ME4