So 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...

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nostrademons 3 days ago | parent [-]

Hanlon'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 3 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Stupidity 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 3 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Ah 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).