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nostrademons 3 days ago

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).