Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Doctor Hammer's avatar

I would defend Hanlon's Razor just a little bit. I think it is fairly applicable when dealing with people you personally know and are interacting with. Most people are just ignorant, not malicious, so most people you interact with day to day really just are not paying attention, as it were.

Where it breaks down, hard, is when you move from normal people you interact with day to day to highly selective groups. Business executives, for instance, are not a random sampling of people, but rather a very small percentage that is highly selected for certain traits. If those traits include, say, goal driven sociopathy, then yea, assuming their intentions are not bad is going to be a big mistake generally. Scale that up to politicians who are an even tinier percentage of the population and much more filtered for certain traits, and the razor should definitely be flipped and we should assume malice until proven otherwise.

Put another way, abuse of Hanlon's Razor seems to me to be a version of the human mistake Hayek cites for the appeal of socialism: applying behavior that is appropriate for the family and close friends to behavior appropriate to anonymous society, and vice versa. A useful rule of thumb for assumptions about humans at large (anonymous society) is really destructive when applied to small and highly selected groups (elites), just as applying the rules of markets to your family interactions would be pretty awful.

whiskeys's avatar

I'm still amazed that Theosophy caught on, as the whole scam was rumbled by one Mr Aleister Crowley, of all people.

Theosophy first really caught on in London, with the idea that upper middle-class Englishmen were the absolute pinnacle of evolution (that they also had scads of money didn't hurt, I'm sure).

It worked like this: Madame Blavatsky would stand before a curtain, and receive letters of wisdom for the audience dropped down from her Red Indian Spirit Guide behind the curtain.

Mr Crowley, being a suspicious sort, stood up one evening and pulled the curtain down

Lo and behold, there stood Madame's assistant, Franz, standing on a chair, holding several letters.

The meeting was abruptly adjourned, and Mr Crowley was banned for life.

The weird part is that most people came back. And more came...

You get the idea. Me, I'm still wondering why.

93 more comments...

No posts

Ready for more?