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| ▲ | lovelearning 16 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | The problem with "Hanlon's Razor" is that everything can be explained by incompetence by making suitable assumptions. It outright denies the possibility of malice and pretends as if malice is rare. Basically, a call to always give the benefit of the doubt to every person or participant's moral character without any analysis whatsoever of their track record. Robert Hanlon himself doesn't seem to be notable in any area of rationalist or scientific philosophy. The most I could find about him online is that he allegedly wrote a joke book related to Murphy's laws. Over time, it appears this obscure statement from that book was appended with Razor and it gained respectability as some kind of a rationalist axiom. Nowhere is it explained why this Razor needs to be an axiom. It doesn't encourage the need to reason, examine any evidence, or examine any probabilities. Bayesian reasoning? Priors? What the hell are those? Just say "Hanlon's Razor" and nothing more needs to be said. Nothing needs to be examined. The FS blog also cops out on this lazy shortcut by saying this: > The default is to assume no malice and forgive everything. But if malice is confirmed, be ruthless. No conditions. No examination of data. Just an absolute assumption of no malice. How can malice ever be confirmed in most cases? Malicious people don't explain all their deeds so we can "be ruthless." We live in a probabilistic world but this Razor blindly says always assume the probability of malice is zero, until using some magical leap of reasoning that must not involve assuming any malice whatsoever anywhere in the chain of reasoning (because Hanlon's Razor!), this probability of malice magically jumps to one, after which we must "become ruthless." I find it all quite silly. https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor https://fs.blog/mental-model-hanlons-razor/ | | |
| ▲ | danielheath 14 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Assuming incompetence instead of malice is how you remain collegiate and cordial with others. Assuming malice from people you interact with means dividing your community into smaller and smaller groups, each suspicious of the other. Assuming malice from an out group who have regularly demonstrated their willingness to cause harm doesn’t have that problem. | | |
| ▲ | makeitdouble 14 hours ago | parent [-] | | From parent's comment > It doesn't encourage the need to reason, examine any evidence, or examine any probabilities Parent isn't advocating for assuming malice, or assuming anything really, but to reason about the causes. Basically, that we'd have better discourse if no axiom was used in the first place. |
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| ▲ | AppleBananaPie 15 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I agree. It seems to be an all too common example of both:
1. lack of nuance in thought (i.e. either assume good intentions or assume malice, not some probability of either, or a scale of malice)
2. the overwhelming prevalence of bad faith arguments, most commonly picking the worst possible argument feasibly with someone's words. In this case instead of a possibility of it being a small act of opportunity (like mentioned above of just dragging feet) not premeditated, alternatives are never mentioned but instead just assumed folks are talking about some higher up conspiracy and on top of that that must be what these people are always doing. Anyway thank you for your point it is an interesting read :) | |
| ▲ | chrisweekly 15 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | IMHO you're taking it a bit too literally and seriously; I suggest interpreting it more loosely, ie "err on the side of assuming incompetence [given incompetence is rampant] and not malice [which is much rarer]." As a rule of thumb, it's a good one. | | |
| ▲ | makeitdouble 14 hours ago | parent [-] | | To me the more problematic part is anchoring the discussion into rejecting a specific extreme (malice) when there will be a lot of behavior either milder, or neither incompetence nor malice. For instance is greed, opportunism or apathy malice ? | | |
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| ▲ | lazyasciiart 14 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | It doesn’t say don’t think about malice as a possibility, it says that if you aren’t going to think about it, you should ignore malice as a possibility. | |
| ▲ | Ferret7446 15 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | That's because actual malice IS rare. Corporations are not filled with evil people, but people make perfectly rational, normal decisions based on their incentives that result in the emergent phenomenon of perceived malicious actions. Even Hitler's actions can be traced through a perfectly understandable, although not morally condone-able, chain of events. I truly believe that he did not want to just kill people and commit evil, he truly wanted to better Germany and the human race, but on his journey he drove right off the road, so to speak. To quote CS Lewis, "Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." | | |
| ▲ | tbrownaw 15 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | That's why scapegoating and demonizing people is so bad, it's a way of telling folks that violence can make the world better instead of worse. | |
| ▲ | AppleBananaPie 15 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | What is rare? How is this measured? Why do incentives result in perceived malicious actions rather than just malicious actions or minor malicious actions? On top of this no one has said corporations are filled with evil people. | |
| ▲ | Supermancho 15 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > Corporations are not filled with evil people, but people make perfectly rational, normal decisions based on their incentives that result in the emergent phenomenon of perceived malicious actions. This rationalization is cope. All US Corporations making "normal" decisions all the time isn't casually obvious. I would say that wherever there is an opportunity to exploit the customer, they usually do at different levels of sophistication. This may mistakenly seem like fair play to someone who thinks a good UI is a good trade for allocated advertisement space, when it's literally social engineering. Corporations make decisions that more frequently benefit them at the cost of some customer resource. Pair that with decisions rarely being rolled back (without financial incentive), you get a least-fair optimization over time. This is not normal by any stretch, as people expect a somewhat fair value proposition. Corporations aren't geared for that. | |
| ▲ | chrisweekly 15 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Agreed that actual malice is relatively rare (at least, relative to incompetence!). But I feel your take on Hitler is questionable. The question of evil is a tricky one, but I don't think there's a good case to be made that he was only trying to do the right thing. He was completely insane. But leaving aside moral culpability or metaphysical notions of judgment, for any definition of "malice", he embodied it to an the absolute maximum degree. | |
| ▲ | zuminator 13 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > That's because actual malice IS rare. Corporations are not filled with evil people, Corporations don't have to be filled with evil people for malice to be rampant. All it takes is for one person in a position of power or influence who is highly motivated to screw over other human beings to create a whole lot of malice. We can all think of examples of public officials or powerful individuals who have made it their business to spread misery to countless others. Give them a few like-minded deputies and the havoc they wreak can be incalculable. As for Hitler, if we can't even agree that orchestrating and facilitating the death of millions of innocent people is malicious, then malice has no meaning. C. S. Lewis has written a great many excellent things, but his quote there strikes me as self-satisfied sophistry. Ask people being carpet bombed or blockade and starved if they're grateful that at least their adversary isn't trying to help them. | |
| ▲ | SantalBlush 15 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The "malice" part of the razor is bait. People typically act out of self-interest, not malice. That's why anyone who parrots Hanlon's Razor has already lost; they fell for the false dichotomy between malice and incompetence, when self-interest isn't even offered as an explanation. | |
| ▲ | leakycap 15 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Ferret7446: > Even Hitler's actions can be traced through a perfectly understandable, although not morally condone-able, chain of events. I truly believe that he did not want to just kill people and commit evil, he truly wanted to better Germany and the human race, but on his journey he drove right off the road, so to speak. Disgusting take. Don't simp for hitler. How am I having to type this in 2025? |
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| ▲ | SantalBlush 15 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Yep, "Hanlon's Razor" is pseudo-intellectual nonsense. It sets up a false dichotomy between two characteristics, neither of which is usually sufficient to explain a bad action. |
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| ▲ | silverquiet 16 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I recently heard on a podcast where one of the guests recounted what his father used to say about the employees making cash-handling mistakes in the small store he owned. It was something like, "if it was merely incompetence, you'd think half of the errors would be in my favor." It probably is a glitch in this case, but it's hard not to see the dark patterns once you've learned about them. | | |
| ▲ | ipaddr 13 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | If you short charge a customer they will demand correct change if you overpay a customer won't complain. In the cases of customers giving back extra money it becomes neutral. His father's theory didn't take into account this. | |
| ▲ | trained6446 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Incompetence, filtered by customers biased to complain when cheated, and ignore mistakes in their favour? |
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| ▲ | Aurornis 16 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | I’m amazed at the prevalence of conspiracy theories on HN in recent years. Even for simple topics like a website crashing under load we get claims that it’s actually a deliberate conspiracy, even though the crashes have turned this from a quiet event into a social media and news phenomenon, likely accelerating the number of cancellations. | | |
| ▲ | arcticbull 16 hours ago | parent [-] | | COVID years really messed some people up. | | |
| ▲ | leakycap 14 hours ago | parent [-] | | You mean like all the people that died? The caretakers in the years after? The medical staff who never got a break? You're right about that. | | |
| ▲ | arcticbull 12 hours ago | parent [-] | | My comment was not about COVID. | | |
| ▲ | leakycap 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Your comment was: > COVID years really messed some people up. You seem to think that you said something different than you did. If you don't see where your communication broke down, look closely the first word of the quote above. That's you, in case you forgot. |
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| ▲ | 8note 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | my first manager told my as i started my first oncall "we dont think anybody actually cares about this thing, so if it breaks, dont fix it too quickly, so we can see who notices" |
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