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If something in the world doesn’t make sense, figure out who’s profiting from it. That’s something that a friend mentioned to me a few years ago, haven’t forgo
by sunrunner 1y ago
If something in the world doesn’t make sense, figure out who’s profiting from it.
That’s something that a friend mentioned to me a few years ago, haven’t forgotten it since, and now everything does make sense when viewed from the right context.
- sunrunner 1y agoAnd for a specific example: In my local neighbourhood there are a couple of commercial spaces that keep seeming to become new businesses, go through the expected few months of rebranding and outfitting, stay for a couple more months, then shut down. Only to become new businesses doing the same thing. Repeat ad nauseum. Which would be fine, except it’s always the same owners. I’m not sure what the grift is, but I’m sure there’s one. Perhaps its simply taking advantage of business loans. Perhaps something more involved with contractors and business expenses charged differently on paper. I’m not sure, but I’m sure I’m curious. In the same way that buying a company and taking out business loans for expenses isn’t itself fraudulent, but can be done for that purpose, I can’t help but feel like there’s something going on.
- wombatpm 1y agoCrappy contractors change business names like hats. I had one that was on his third name by the time I finished with him.
- HPsquared 1y agoThe expression goes back to the Roman Republic. Coined by former consul Lucius Cassius Longinus Ravilla, who 'gained fame for formulating the question "Cui bono?" ("Who benefits?") as a principle of criminal investigation.' https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cui_bono https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cui_bono
- sunrunner 1y agoSo "Follow the Money" has a much earlier origin and wasn't just a catchy phrase from various TV drama series? Figures.
- Eridrus 1y agoThis is a fairly common view, but it overstates people's rationality abd assumes you have perfect information, leading people to pretty conspiratorial views. Often the actual answer to things not making sense is that most things in the world are done poorly and many things are some mish mash of various interests rather than a singular actor. Incompetence is far more common than malice, and many observers are themselves incompetent.
- sunrunner 1y agoSo Occam's razor then? That's a fair point. I'm torn between how much my instinct is to ascribe things to incompetence, malice, or profiteering...
- nostrademons 1y agoHanlon's razor: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." Occam's razor is "the simplest explanation is most likely to be true". Hanlon's razor is a special case of Occam's razor if you assume that stupidity is simpler than malice, which is a hard statement to prove in concrete terms, but intuitively seems to be true.
- BobaFloutist 1y agoStupidity is simpler than malice because a plan that seems dumb would need to be far more complex to be secretly smart and malicious than to just actually be dumb.
- sunrunner 1y agoAh yes, the wrong razor. Or, like you say, a more general version of it that might still apply (but wasn't the one I was thinking of).