"twenty years of schooling and they put you on the day shift"

The single most valuable thing I learned during my years of post-doctoral training in the intramural research program of the National Institutes of Health is:

Never attribute to maliciousness anything that can be explained by stupidity.

And the single most valuable thing I learned in my first faculty position, at Georgetown University Medical Center, is a modification or addendum to that lesson, yielding:

Never attribute to maliciousness anything that can be explained by stupidity or inattention.

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