Comment by sunrunner
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...
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...
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.
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.