Just because it has a wikipedia article doesnt mean is isn't nonsense, but first we must agree on what we think the heuristic is. We observe a event that is har

Just because it has a wikipedia article doesnt mean is isn't nonsense, but first we must agree on what we think the heuristic is. We observe a event that is harmful to us, and we have to decide whether that behavior was caused by a rational agent. Hanlons Razor, as you are using it, says that is usually not the case. There is a reason for the heuristic to hold for a time after a big change in human society. This usually corresponds to a time when the peoppe in power don't understand what was going on. They had strategies that were successful in the previous age and those strategies are obsolete now. The first usage seems to be approximately in the time of Napoleon, when gunpowder fundamentally changed feudalism. For another example, compared to its younger brother, World War 1 could have had Yakety Sax as its soundtrack. There is also a really compelling machanism by which Hanlon's razor fails to apply. Eventually it is the case that competent, selfish strategies prevail and proliferate. They don't go away once they exist, they just accumulate. Eventually, behavior you encounter can be most easily explained by deducing the optimal strategy for the agents involved. This is roughly how biologists operate, and they only study things with comparatively low intelligence. It should be noted that Hanlon's razor is, as a rule, completely incompatible with the equally popular Chesterton's fence heuristic. If incompetence is likely the correct explanation for the fence, then its fine to get rid of.