Hanlon's Razor is unreal

Overview

Hanlon’s Razor states:

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

Some use cases replace stupidity with incompetence.

Earlier, I defined real:

An entity is "real" if including it in your model leads to better predictions by improving accuracy or simplifying the modeling.

Hanlon’s Razor is simply not real.

Argument

It is easily possible to explain any observation after the fact. Doing so is a matter of curve fitting, data mining, or simply being vague. While you can explain any event as being “God’s will”, that explanation is unsatisfying.

In general, malicious intent would like to disguise itself as incompetence. For this reason, falsifying any Hanlon’s Razor is difficult. But in the act of falsifying it, it automatically retreats, since the event is now no longer adequately explained by stupidity. It was presented as a piece of wisdom, without justification, and evades damage from counterexamples.

Worse, using it for prediction results in effectively nothing, aside from an unjustified distortion to prior probabilities. Will something go wrong? Not helpful. If something goes wrong, what will it be? Not helpful. Something went wrong? Oh, it was unintentional, it just happened. The evidence is suspicious? Forget about it. I found proof! OK, you can believe in malice now.

Example

A class of examples will help show that it’s not even generally believed. Let’s imagine a government process for starting a business.

1) The business needs a tax id number. The government process is so incompetent that it takes 2 years to be able to pay tax. Until then, the business should hold onto the money. Sometimes the application is lost, in which case the business is required to refile. In the worst case, tax is not required.

2) The business needs a license to operate. The government process is so incompetent that it takes 2 years to be able to trade. Until then, the business should wait to begin. Sometimes the application is lost, in which case the business is required to refile. In the worst case, the business can’t operate.

If you laughed at #1 and not at #2, then it’s clear the government system is not operating on pure incompetence. On a similar note, many companies have efficient processes for getting paid, but localized incompetence for paying out claims. The people involved need not even be malicious, just the system looks out for its interest by strategically arranging competence and incompetence.

Equivalence

We see two styles of malice - individual malice and swarm malice. Swarm structure is not generally considered when attributing causality. As a result, Hanlon’s razor may be reformulated:

A) Swarms are not malicious, though they may contain malicious people and

B) Disguised malicious actions are so rare compared with stupid actions that they should be discounted by default

I would be happy to reject Hanlon’s razor due to B alone. However, A is clearly absurd. Hanlon’s razor should be discarded and ignored.