Hanlon-Clarke Corollary

I went into a deep research hole trying to discover the origin of the quote:

“Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.”

tl;dr: Earliest online record of this quote is by Vernon Schryver on May 1, 2002.

Grey’s Law, 1996?

Wikipedia, LLMs, and various random blog posts cite it as “Grey’s Law” which I haven’t been able to corroborate.

Wikipedia references a book from 2015 which refers to the quote as “Grey’s Law” but attributes it to “unknown author”. I couldn’t find an actual source for someone named Grey, and closest “Grey” reference I’ve found mentioned is a Youtuber named CGP Grey from 2010+.

Meanwhile, Rationalwiki’s Talk section on Grey’s Law has an anecdotal story from someone who claims to have made that quote in the 90’s under a handle related to Grey:

[…] I have a distinct memory that some point in the very late 90’s or early 00’s was the first time (for me) that I posited the maxim “any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice,” with explicit crediting of Clarke and Hanlon. […]

Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find actual archives of posts with this quote from the 90s.

Vernon Schryver, 2002

Earliest online record of this quote is by Vernon Schryver on May 1, 2002 on in the news.admin.net-abuse.email usenet newsgroup, which has sadly been purged by Google Groups but luckily archive.org still has a snapshot: https://web.archive.org/web/20070221155843/http://groups.google.com/group/news.admin.net-abuse.email/msg/f9f67dca7591a860

Napoleon-Clarke Law, 2004

It was later dubbed the “Napoleon-Clarke Law” by Paul Ciszek on October 11, 2004 in the rec.arts.sf.fandom usenet group. Paul explains later in the same thread:

Well, Napoleon said something about not attributing to malice that which is adequately explained by incomptence, and Clarke said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. So far as I know I am the first one to put them together and call it the Napoleon-Clarke law.

After finding some of the pieces pointing to Vernon Schryver and Paul Ciszek, I stumbled on this excellent overview thread by Kevin J. Maroney in Sept 25, 2005 on the rec.arts.sf.fandom newsgroup that is worth a read: https://groups.google.com/g/rec.arts.sf.fandom/c/1JaqxckrAOc/m/xO5jzyejK1UJ

Hanlon-Clarke Corrolary

We later reattributed Napoleon’s quote to Hanlon’s Razor.

Coming back full circle with Grey’s anecdote who correctly attributed the mashup to Hanlon and Clarke, I’m going to take this opportunity to further rebrand Vernon’s quote as the Hanlon-Clarke Corollary.

Until we can find better corroboration of Grey’s anecdote (please reach out if you have a lead!), I say we attribute this quote mashup to Vernon Schryver.

Hanlon-Clarke Corollary: “Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.” ~ Vernon Schryver, 2002