I like to remind people that Hanlons razor is a logical fallacy, and really shouldn't be used nearly as much as it is, especially the way it is (in an isolated context)
Maybe if you have never spent any time in the military.
Would it be ok for me to say that Theranos failed because of stupidity because halons razor? All i know is the company failed and i don't have time to read any articles so aren't i justified in saying it was stupidity not malice?
I’ve never been in the military, but I have lots of time in massive bureaucracy.
So many people are involved in the decision making process it’s nearly impossible to make a decision about anything. When I hear speculation about a conspiracy involving printer toner in Iraq, that sounds like nonsense without evidence.
Theranos is the opposite. A naive young founder pretending to be the reincarnation of Steve Jobs with a manipulative guru/mentor/lover pulling the strings is like a Petri dish for corruption.
I'm not see'ing it, and a quick google search isn't finding any support for that idea; it seems to me quite reasonable: Given 2 common possible explanations, prefer one. Perhaps the "Never" is at issue, but I doubt anyone ever actually interprets never as never.
Even if we accept that (even though a maxim that starts out "we should hesitate to" rather than "never" will be much less rhetorically potent), HR claims to observe a fact about the world: that malice is far less common than stupidity, or at least that it's profitable to behave as if that were the case. I've never seen that observation supported, in any discussion about HR. My own experience of the world contradicts that observation much of the time. Probably not most of the time, but enough to make it a mistake to stop thinking, as HR advises us to do.
In fact it's often wise to act as if one sees stupidity, even when one suspects malice. In that way one may tempt the malicious into overstepping. But HR doesn't say anything about actions, only about attributions.
