Hanlon's Razor

Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.

I've seen far too much malice feigning stupidity to ever take this concept seriously. There's a lot of stupidity, but there's also a lot of corruption parading around as stupidity.

Fundamentally I would argue that this conflates malice and greed. They may be bedfellows, but aren’t necessarily the same thing.

Regardless, this still wouldn’t break Hanlon’s Razor because when you have enough information to adequately explain corruption so devious that it has been intentionally dressed as stupidity, it is rarely explained adequately with mere stupidity.

I think that not all things can be sufficiently explained by stupidity no matter how intenslt people attempt to feign it.

Also, malice is inherently stupid.

If an action can be adequately explained by stupidity but requires more assumptions than explaining it via malice does, then accepting Hanlon's razor would be in violation of Occam's razor.

I wonder though if it needs to be malice or simply lack of will / motivation. If you have pressure from both sides (and the politics that initiated this) it can really kill any motivation to really dig and and do your job. Combine this with all the turbulence in federal gov positions, it might just feel like a total shit show to work there and some people may just putting in their time for the pension or w/e.

A lot of maybes, but I do wonder if the wheels of government are still recovering and whether the consequences of this are sometimes indirect and not so obvious. Bad management can leave waves.

TBH if I worked in public services over the last few year I'd probably feel pretty under-appreciated and it would be hard to motivate myself.

Borrowing from Wikipedia, I prefer this phrasing:

Misunderstandings and lethargy perhaps produce more wrong in the world than deceit and malice do. At least the latter two are certainly rarer.

You forget we're talking about politicians; typically you get both.

What is the razor we should use when it’s neither malice nor stupidity, but instead just an unwinnable case? It seems like way too many people think it’s easy to prove Facebook is a monopoly.

It probably would be easy to prove (or at least support the claim); it sounds more like the FTC didn't even try.

Indeed,

through I also think we might need to better differentiate between content platforms with social aspect (YouTube, TickTock), Social Networks (Facebook, Instagram?) and Messengers (WhatsApp, Signal, etc.).

Hanlon's whetstone: Sometimes it takes so much effort to be stupid, the malice is implied. Just, not necessarily in the direction you think.

Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by politics.

Mark Zuckerberg made some substantial (100s of millions I’ve read) donations to the DNC and proxies. It would be surprising that they would then almost immediately try to destroy his company. A quid pro quo is pretty believable.