Hanlon’s Razor is an old adage that boils down to: when you think someone is intentionally trying to be evil and ruin something, take a step back and ask whether it’s likelier they’re trying to be intentionally malicious, or if they’re just stupid/incompetent.
For example, you go to a restaurant and tell the waiter that you can’t have dairy, so you order a pasta dish without cheese. They bring it out to you, but look, there’s cheese. You can assume either that the waiter or the staff in the kitchen absolutely hate you and intentionally gave you cheese just to spite you…or that they just screwed up and forgot. The latter is probably likelier.
I was half-joking about potentially updating this idea to include an additional stipulation about AI bots online, which are good at looking like stupid people but actually are often malicious. Bots are used to sway political opinions. You have cases where they are trying to pass themselves off as real people to drown out legitimate discourse with a simulation of it, and cases like Musk’s Grok AI where it’s programmed to ignore truth and instead answer questions in ways that further his agenda or inflate his ego.
So sometimes when you see political posts that just defy all logic, or are ignoring a hard truth that is staring them in the face, you’re inclined to ask “How can this person sincerely believe what they’re saying right now?” And often the answer will be that they don’t, because they’re not a person, they’re a bot just regurgitating propagandic talking points.
Hanlon’s Razor is an old adage that boils down to: when you think someone is intentionally trying to be evil and ruin something, take a step back and ask whether it’s likelier they’re trying to be intentionally malicious, or if they’re just stupid/incompetent.
For example, you go to a restaurant and tell the waiter that you can’t have dairy, so you order a pasta dish without cheese. They bring it out to you, but look, there’s cheese. You can assume either that the waiter or the staff in the kitchen absolutely hate you and intentionally gave you cheese just to spite you…or that they just screwed up and forgot. The latter is probably likelier.
I was half-joking about potentially updating this idea to include an additional stipulation about AI bots online, which are good at looking like stupid people but actually are often malicious. Bots are used to sway political opinions. You have cases where they are trying to pass themselves off as real people to drown out legitimate discourse with a simulation of it, and cases like Musk’s Grok AI where it’s programmed to ignore truth and instead answer questions in ways that further his agenda or inflate his ego.
So sometimes when you see political posts that just defy all logic, or are ignoring a hard truth that is staring them in the face, you’re inclined to ask “How can this person sincerely believe what they’re saying right now?” And often the answer will be that they don’t, because they’re not a person, they’re a bot just regurgitating propagandic talking points.