Quotation mashup
07Jan08
Hugh came out with a good one today – “any sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice“. This is a close cousin of Grey’s law, which gets a mention on the Wikipedia page for Hanlon’s razor. It seems like a good mash up of a couple of my old favorites – Napoleon’s “never ascribe to malice, that which can be explained by incompetence”, and Arthur C Clarke’s “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”.
Filed under: wibble | 2 Comments
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I wish I had come up with myself. I can’t remember where I encountered it, but will search the googleverse to see if I can find the original source. But it’s both a great line (shades of Douglas Adams almost) and also a good precept by which to navigate the vagaries of any large enterprise ;-)
Groovy quote, the only trouble is… it’s a lot easier to forgive ignorance than malice, and I like to avoid resentment.