Hanlon’s razor: more likely stupidity than malice

Hanlon’s razor tells us that we should not assume the worst of others. Hanlon’s razor is most often expressed by the aphorism

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

We humans often tend to see the world in the darkest colours and expect nothing but the worst from other people. Did a waiter in a restaurant spill beer on us? He must have done it on purpose, because we forgot to greet him. Did our boss refuse our holiday request? She is surely just taking revenge for our poor quarterly results. Did the Mars Climate Orbiter probe burn up in the atmosphere of Mars? Somebody must have sabotaged NASA’s scientific work!

It is easy to see malice in these cases, because it gives us a clear explanation of what happened. A waiter who has worked in that restaurant for five years surely isn’t so stupid as to spill beer on us, so there must be some malice behind it! In reality, it is much more likely that he slipped on water spilt by a child from the next table and spilt the beer by accident. An older boss, on the other hand, isn’t exactly on good terms with computers and can’t set up her notifications. So she doesn’t even know about the holiday we requested in the system. And the Climate Orbiter probe? It really did burn up in the atmosphere of Mars in 1999, because two teams (NASA and Lockheed Martin, the company that built the probe) did not agree on whether to use the metric system (that is, metres, kilograms and so on) or the imperial system (that is, feet, pounds and so on). In the end each team mistakenly used a different one, and that led to the disaster.

Are you evil yourself?

Try applying it to yourself: how many times have you hurt someone on purpose, with malicious intent? And how many times did you simply forget something? Fail to notice something? Unless you are a psychopath, mistakes made through inattention, negligence or stupidity happen much more often than those made through malice.

Various conspiracy theories can be viewed in a similar way. We may think that the government, politicians and everyone around us are trying to deceive us, that they all act with the aim of enslaving us. The moment we say to ourselves surely they aren’t stupid enough to do XYZ, let’s remember Hanlon’s razor: it is much more likely that they really are that stupid.

Is there really no evil in the world?

Of course evil exists in the world. Hanlon’s razor only tells us that malice should not be the first thing that occurs to us when we run into a problem. Most of the time, someone’s incompetence or mistake is the more likely explanation than someone’s malice. Occasionally, though, it really does happen that the main cause is someone’s malice. The world is not a perfect place to live.

Sources and further reading

• Hanlon’s Razor: Relax, Not Everything is Out to Get You
• Wikipedia: Hanlon's razor