Clark's Law is an adage that reads:
| “ | Sufficiently advanced cluelessness is indistinguishable from malice. | ” |
A variant is:
| “ | Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice. | ” |
It is called "Clark's Law" because: the oldest extant record of the "cluelessness" phrasing was from a 1994 Usenet post by NASA employee J. Porter Clark;[1][2] and it is structured very much like the third of Clarke's three laws, which is sometimes simply referred to as "Clarke's Law":
| “ | Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. | ” |
Science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke Clarke proposed the third Law in the 1973 revised edition of Profiles of the Future.[Footnotes 1]
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.[3]
- The "incompetence" variant has been widely applied to government action, particularly the federal response to Hurricane Katrina.[4]
See also
Footnotes
- ^ Sources differ on when Clarke first used the phrase: 1953, 1961, 1973 have all been claimed.
References
- ^ 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
- ^ 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 Sideshow September 2005 Archive
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