Building a better idiot

Well. I have a bit of a conundrum. I seem to recall that in a Heinlein book, the author, Robert Anson Heinlein had one of his characters say something along the lines of "make a system idiot proof and the world will build a better idiot". Despite wracking my brain to remember what book that was in, asking my sister (another Antipodean Heinlein fan), and asking a friend, I still cannot find the quote (even Google, Duck Duck Go, and WikiQuote come up empty). My sister suspects that this may have been a pearl dropped by RAH characters Jubal Harshaw or Johann Sebastian Smith. The friend pointed me to the Douglas Adams quote: "a common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools" (Adams, 1992, p. 113) but that seems far too recent for me – I seem to remember the quote from the 1970s (or perhaps the 1980s at a push).

I have tried searching my Heinlein ebooks, but feel that the wording from my fuzzy recollection is probably too inaccurate for a match.

So, faced with a full re-read of my collection to find this quote (which would be fine, but the lack of attribution is gnawing at me a bit), or trying something else, I wrote to the Heinlein Society. And within just a few hours, a lovely man named Walt Boyes had emailed me, advising that the writer of the better idiot saying was an author by the name of Rick Cook (never heard of the author) from a book called "The Wizardry Compiled” (nor the book either, but hey). Walt also added that "Heinlein would certainly agree with it", which was lovely.

So I got the book out of the library and found the quote at the beginning of Chapter 6 as an epigraph: “Applications programming is a race between software engineers, who strive to produce idiot-proof programs, and the Universe which strives to produce bigger idiots” (1990, p. 39)... with a post-script: "So far the Universe is winning". Yeah, but no. That is similar to, but is not quite the saying that I remember.

And I now have a real puzzle, as I recall this differently (make something idiot proof and the world builds a better idiot), and from earlier than 1990… and have never read – or heard of – Rick Cook (1990). But at least that moves us back in time two years from Douglas Adams (1992).

I guess I am now looking at a full Heinlein re-read. Sigh.

Sam

References:

Adams, D. (1992). Mostly Harmless. William Heinemann.

Cook, R. (1990). The Wizardry Compiled. Baen Books.