On Tuesday, 4 March 2014 at 19:18:28 UTC, Russel Winder wrote:
On Tue, 2014-03-04 at 10:27 -0800, H. S. Teoh wrote:
On Tue, Mar 04, 2014 at 06:19:38PM +0000, Chris wrote:
[…]
> True, true. The fact that the compiler can check for the
> right types
> is great.
>
> Btw, the quote you have in this post:
>
> Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by
> incompetence. -- Napoleon Bonaparte
>
> I'm surprised that Napoleon would say something like this.
> Malice is
> often a characteristic of the incompetent. The only way to
> get the
> better of their betters. :-)
I'm not sure if that attribution is accurate. Nick has pointed
out to me
that he knows the same quote attributed to someone else, so
this may be
a case of internet misattribution (I picked up that quote from
somewhere
online, way back when -- no idea if the source was reliable,
y'know,
being the internet and everything).
I present you the following, which between then give a good
account of
the whole situation. Sort of. Possibly.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor
https://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/Hanlon_s_razor.html
http://blog.writch.com/2009/04/hanlons-razor-which-i-knew-as-heinleins-razor.html
This reminds me of Cipolla's laws of human stupidity. Put this
into your search engine:
Basic Laws of Human Stupidity, Carlo M. Cipolla
Also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlo_M._Cipolla
Enjoy!
