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Friday, 7 March 2025

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.

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2 comments :

  1. DarkwingDave16 March 2026 at 19:27

    **The quote (or very close variants like yours) is commonly known as *Grave's Law***: "If you make something idiot-proof, the world will create a better idiot."

    It's treated as an informal extension of **Murphy's Law** in engineering, design, aviation maintenance, and safety contexts. The idea is that no matter how many safeguards or "foolproof" features you add, people will inevitably find (or evolve) a more creative way to break it.

    Your exact phrasing—"make a system idiot proof and the world will build a better idiot"—is a popular everyday variant of the same law (sometimes worded as "the world will build/create a better idiot" or even "God builds a better idiot").

    A longer, widely circulated version of the *same core idea* (especially in tech/programming circles) comes from sci-fi author **Rick Cook** in his 1989 novel *The Wizardry Compiled*:

    > "Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning."

    This one is solidly attributed to him (it's listed on Wikiquote under that book), though it's occasionally misattributed to Douglas Adams or others.

    In short: **no single famous inventor** for the short "idiot-proof" version—it's a folk adage dubbed Grave's Law—but the spirit traces back to Murphy's Law extensions from the mid-20th century onward. The programming race version is definitively Rick Cook's.

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    1. Sam Young13 April 2026 at 21:08

      Thanks very much for the reply, DarkwingDave: I had not heard this as "Grave's Law" before. Woohoo: new information!

      I have also found an earlier kinda sorta version than that of Rick Cook (who I cited in the post above, and used the page from his book as the illustration) which will be going live on the 24th of this month. Check in then!

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