Hanlon's Razor

"Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by stupidity."

Some versions prefer "incompetence" to stupidity, thus connotating short-sightedness rather than simple ignorance or wrongheadedness. It is not known who "Hanlon" is; possibly the name is a linguistic corruption of "Heinlein."

When anything is possible, mistakes are inevitable. If nothing in Puzzlebox happens by accident, then whatever is happening to you is because someone made it happen. The emotional response is to immediately assume maliciousness; the intellectual response is to immediately assume incompetence.

Gilb's Laws of Unreliability

"At the source of every error which is blamed on the computer you will find at least two human errors, including the error of blaming it on the computer." [See more laws... ]