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Remember the old adage - never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. Hanlon's Razor, I believe it was. And here, by "stupidity,

Remember the old adage - never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. Hanlon's Razor, I believe it was. And here, by "stupidity," I just mean the author didn't think about that. Too often people are willing to attribute sinister meaning to what, in reality, was just a mistake.

_wldu 5y ago
I would not say people are stupid. We should never assume we know why someone did something and then take action based on that assumption. When someone cuts you off in traffic, for example, they probably did not see you or are late for an important event or their wife is in the emergency room having a baby. It probably was not personal or malicious.
Zababa 5y ago
Assuming good intentions is a good way to get abused by people exploiting the fact that you assume good intentions. The person in question did a PR, someone informed her that she should follow the rules, she didn't, merged her PR, more people complained. Right now the PR is still merged. She wrote that whole text, and the PR is still merged. Since I can't read people's mind, a good trick that I learned is to derive intent from actions. Removing a merged PR is easy, especially when you can force merge one in the first place. Yet she didn't do it, but wrote a lot of text that is apparently an apology. If it's an apology, why is there no show of regret by retracting her PR? Maybe because it's not actually an apology. Edit: the PR was removed by the current maintainer.
- throwawayboise 5y ago
  > Assuming good intentions is a good way to get abused by people exploiting the fact that you assume good intentions. And assuming bad intentions is a good way to live a miserable unhappy life.
  - Zababa 5y ago
    Yes, which is why I think deriving intentions from actions is useful in a lot of cases.
- derefr 5y ago
  > If it's an apology, why is there no show of regret by retracting her PR? Perhaps because nobody has asked her to do so. Despite the contribution process not being followed, the results are seemingly desirable; and so nobody seems to want to worsen the codebase by reverting the change, even temporarily. Process is great when it improves quality, but process followed just to follow process—when it won't result in a change in quality—is just pageantry. Engineers are generally too practical (and impatient!) to participate in pageantry, even as an act of public humiliation for someone they're annoyed with. The repo has other maintainers; any of them could have reverted the merge and demanded the PR process be followed, if they thought it was a good idea to do that. What intent do you derive from their inaction?
  - gpm 5y ago
    > My understanding is that she did a PR, quickly merged it, and people only noticed after it had already happened. Nobody interjected to complain; there wasn't really time to do so. The PR is here, it was explicitly rejected (with two comments) and closed before she merged it https://github.com/reactiveui/splat/pull/778 https://github.com/reactiveui/splat/pull/778
- gpm 5y ago
  > and the PR is still merged. It looks like the actual maintainer reverted it? https://github.com/reactiveui/splat/pull/779 https://github.com/reactiveui/splat/pull/779
  - Zababa 5y ago
    They did, I made the same mistake here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28779659 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28779659
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
nimvlaj30 5y ago
Hanlon's Razor is just a heuristic. What is the reasoning for following it? Or do we just blindly follow an age-old adage because it sounds philosophical?
- bovermyer 5y ago
  For my part, I'm going off of my life experiences. In the vast majority of cases, the logic behind Hanlon's Razor held. Many times I assumed malicious intent and was proved wrong. As I've gotten older, I've assumed malicious intent less frequently.
  - Zababa 5y ago
    I would assume that you fell on the "assume malicious intent too much" side of what's probably a normal distribution, while some other people are on the other side. If that theory is correct, people like you would benefit from Hanlon's razor, but other people would not, they should do the opposite. I think "people that don't assume enough malicious intent" are a real thing, so I think Hanlon's razor is not an universally good recommandation.
heavyset_go 5y ago
Hanlon's razor is a great principle to apply to your personal relationships, but you'll make yourself a mark if you start applying it to the machinations of trillion dollar companies.
jeffparsons 5y ago
Sometimes Hanlon's razor is in tension with Occam's. If it looks like a duck, and it quacks like a duck, maybe it is actually a bad actor. Or something like that. Either way, I think the idea of "the banality of evil" is more useful here than Hanlon's Razor. Claire Novotny may well have simply not thought about her actions. Is she still responsible for them? Should we care that she meant well if she continued her bad behaviour after it was pointed out to her? And what if somebody makes a habit of not thinking about their actions despite having it pointed out to them repeatedly that their actions cause harm to others? (It sure seems to be an effective way to climb the ladder.) Can they still hide behind the defense of "meaning well"? By analogy, what if somebody makes a habit of getting behind the wheel while intoxicated. If they hit a pedestrian, how much do you care that the drunk driver meant well?
- bovermyer 5y ago
  I would hardly equate drunk driving to Novotny's actions. But to address your analogy, I simply do not have enough information to tell whether Ms. Novotny is a bad actor or not. In the absence of such information, I can only assess a situation based on my prior life experiences.

_wldu 5y ago

I would not say people are stupid. We should never assume we know why someone did something and then take action based on that assumption. When someone cuts you off in traffic, for example, they probably did not see you or are late for an important event or their wife is in the emergency room having a baby. It probably was not personal or malicious.

Zababa 5y ago

Assuming good intentions is a good way to get abused by people exploiting the fact that you assume good intentions. The person in question did a PR, someone informed her that she should follow the rules, she didn't, merged her PR, more people complained. Right now the PR is still merged. She wrote that whole text, and the PR is still merged. Since I can't read people's mind, a good trick that I learned is to derive intent from actions. Removing a merged PR is easy, especially when you can force merge one in the first place. Yet she didn't do it, but wrote a lot of text that is apparently an apology. If it's an apology, why is there no show of regret by retracting her PR? Maybe because it's not actually an apology. Edit: the PR was removed by the current maintainer.

throwawayboise 5y ago
> Assuming good intentions is a good way to get abused by people exploiting the fact that you assume good intentions. And assuming bad intentions is a good way to live a miserable unhappy life.
- Zababa 5y ago
  Yes, which is why I think deriving intentions from actions is useful in a lot of cases.
derefr 5y ago
> If it's an apology, why is there no show of regret by retracting her PR? Perhaps because nobody has asked her to do so. Despite the contribution process not being followed, the results are seemingly desirable; and so nobody seems to want to worsen the codebase by reverting the change, even temporarily. Process is great when it improves quality, but process followed just to follow process—when it won't result in a change in quality—is just pageantry. Engineers are generally too practical (and impatient!) to participate in pageantry, even as an act of public humiliation for someone they're annoyed with. The repo has other maintainers; any of them could have reverted the merge and demanded the PR process be followed, if they thought it was a good idea to do that. What intent do you derive from their inaction?
- gpm 5y ago
  > My understanding is that she did a PR, quickly merged it, and people only noticed after it had already happened. Nobody interjected to complain; there wasn't really time to do so. The PR is here, it was explicitly rejected (with two comments) and closed before she merged it https://github.com/reactiveui/splat/pull/778 https://github.com/reactiveui/splat/pull/778
gpm 5y ago
> and the PR is still merged. It looks like the actual maintainer reverted it? https://github.com/reactiveui/splat/pull/779 https://github.com/reactiveui/splat/pull/779
- Zababa 5y ago
  They did, I made the same mistake here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28779659 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28779659
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

nimvlaj30 5y ago

Hanlon's Razor is just a heuristic. What is the reasoning for following it? Or do we just blindly follow an age-old adage because it sounds philosophical?

bovermyer 5y ago
For my part, I'm going off of my life experiences. In the vast majority of cases, the logic behind Hanlon's Razor held. Many times I assumed malicious intent and was proved wrong. As I've gotten older, I've assumed malicious intent less frequently.
- Zababa 5y ago
  I would assume that you fell on the "assume malicious intent too much" side of what's probably a normal distribution, while some other people are on the other side. If that theory is correct, people like you would benefit from Hanlon's razor, but other people would not, they should do the opposite. I think "people that don't assume enough malicious intent" are a real thing, so I think Hanlon's razor is not an universally good recommandation.

heavyset_go 5y ago

Hanlon's razor is a great principle to apply to your personal relationships, but you'll make yourself a mark if you start applying it to the machinations of trillion dollar companies.

jeffparsons 5y ago

Sometimes Hanlon's razor is in tension with Occam's. If it looks like a duck, and it quacks like a duck, maybe it is actually a bad actor. Or something like that. Either way, I think the idea of "the banality of evil" is more useful here than Hanlon's Razor. Claire Novotny may well have simply not thought about her actions. Is she still responsible for them? Should we care that she meant well if she continued her bad behaviour after it was pointed out to her? And what if somebody makes a habit of not thinking about their actions despite having it pointed out to them repeatedly that their actions cause harm to others? (It sure seems to be an effective way to climb the ladder.) Can they still hide behind the defense of "meaning well"? By analogy, what if somebody makes a habit of getting behind the wheel while intoxicated. If they hit a pedestrian, how much do you care that the drunk driver meant well?

bovermyer 5y ago
I would hardly equate drunk driving to Novotny's actions. But to address your analogy, I simply do not have enough information to tell whether Ms. Novotny is a bad actor or not. In the absence of such information, I can only assess a situation based on my prior life experiences.