- Clark's Law
Clark's Law is an
adage which reads:Variant: cquote|Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.Called "Clark's Law" because:
* The oldest extant record of the "cluelessness" phrasing is from a 1994 Usenet post by NASA employee J. Porter Clark. [For those with archival news servers - news:3aeh29$6g4@hammer.msfc.nasa.gov] [Google's archival copy - http://groups.google.com/group/alt.config/msg/595eee6098155967]
* It is structured very much like the third ofClarke's Three Laws , which is sometimes simply referred to as "Clarke's Law" : "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic"Application of Clark's Law
* Reference to the Law is made frequently among people with an interest in email "spam," its senders, and the people who make it lucrative. [ Google search of news.admin.net-abuse.email for the law: http://groups.google.com/groups?as_q=&num=100&scoring=d&as_epq=sufficiently+advanced+cluelessness+is+indistinguishable+from+malice&as_ugroup=news.admin.net-abuse.email]
* The "incompetence" variant has been widely applied to government action, particularly the federal response toHurricane Katrina . [ [http://sideshow.me.uk/ssep05.htm#041417 The Sideshow September 2005 Archive ] ]See also
*
Hanlon's razor References
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