065 Hanlon’s Razor

Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by incompetence.

• Proposed both by Robert Hanlon and science fiction author Robert Heinlein.

• A variant of Ockham’s razor, Hanlon’s razor asserts that when bad things happen that are human-caused, it is far more likely to be the result of ignorance or bureaucracy than conspiracy or malice.

• For example, when Apple’s Siri search was unable to find abortion clinics, many claimed Apple purposefully excluded them from the search results. The more likely explanation is that Siri was incomplete or buggy.

• Keep Hanlon’s razor in mind when bad things happen. The principle does not exclude the possibility of malice—sometimes bad things are, in fact, caused by bad people—but malice is generally less probable.

See Also Affordance • Black Effects • Contour Bias Mimicry • Supernormal Stimulus • Threat Detection

What caused the post-Katrina New Orleans levees to fail? Inadequate engineering is more likely than government conspiracy—though, the government did blow up the levees in 1927 under similar circumstances.