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Hanlon's Razor Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.
by ascar 5y ago
Hanlon's Razor
Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.
- Frost1x 5y agoI've seen far too much malice feigning stupidity to ever take this concept seriously. There's a lot of stupidity, but there's also a lot of corruption parading around as stupidity.
- simondotau 5y agoFundamentally I would argue that this conflates malice and greed. They may be bedfellows, but aren’t necessarily the same thing. Regardless, this still wouldn’t break Hanlon’s Razor because when you have enough information to adequately explain corruption so devious that it has been intentionally dressed as stupidity, it is rarely explained adequately with mere stupidity.
- scotty79 5y agoI think that not all things can be sufficiently explained by stupidity no matter how intenslt people attempt to feign it.
- User23 5y agoAlso, malice is inherently stupid.
- rapind 5y agoI wonder though if it needs to be malice or simply lack of will / motivation. If you have pressure from both sides (and the politics that initiated this) it can really kill any motivation to really dig and and do your job. Combine this with all the turbulence in federal gov positions, it might just feel like a total shit show to work there and some people may just putting in their time for the pension or w/e. A lot of maybes, but I do wonder if the wheels of government are still recovering and whether the consequences of this are sometimes indirect and not so obvious. Bad management can leave waves. TBH if I worked in public services over the last few year I'd probably feel pretty under-appreciated and it would be hard to motivate myself.
- alexeldeib 5y agoBorrowing from Wikipedia, I prefer this phrasing: Misunderstandings and lethargy perhaps produce more wrong in the world than deceit and malice do. At least the latter two are certainly rarer.
- notgonnahappen 5y agoYou forget we're talking about politicians; typically you get both.
- shusaku 5y agoWhat is the razor we should use when it’s neither malice nor stupidity, but instead just an unwinnable case? It seems like way too many people think it’s easy to prove Facebook is a monopoly.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- throwawayboise 5y agoIt probably would be easy to prove (or at least support the claim); it sounds more like the FTC didn't even try.
- dathinab 5y agoIndeed, through I also think we might need to better differentiate between content platforms with social aspect (YouTube, TickTock), Social Networks (Facebook, Instagram?) and Messengers (WhatsApp, Signal, etc.).
- salawat 5y agoHanlon's whetstone: Sometimes it takes so much effort to be stupid, the malice is implied. Just, not necessarily in the direction you think.
- bryanrasmussen 5y agoIf an action can be adequately explained by stupidity but requires more assumptions than explaining it via malice does, then accepting Hanlon's razor would be in violation of Occam's razor.
- sam345 5y agoNever attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by politics.