Comment by lotsofpulp
5 years ago
>”never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity"
I keep reading this on the internet as if it’s some sort of truism, but every situation in life is not a court where a prosecutor is trying to prove intent.
There is insufficient time and resources to evaluate each and every circumstance to determine each and every causative factor, so we have to use heuristics to get by and make the best guesses. And sometimes, even many times, people do act with malice to get what they want. But they’re obviously not going to leave a paper trail for you to be able to prove it.
> I keep reading this on the internet as if it’s some sort of truism
I don’t believe this statement was initially intended to be axiomatic, rather, to serve as a reminder that the injury one is currently suffering is perhaps more likely than not, the result of human frailty.
I'm not sure it's even attributable to stupidity (necessarily) as attributable to automation or, more long-windedly, attributable to the fact that automation at scale will sometimes scale in wacky ways and said scale also makes it nearly impossible--or at least unprofitable--to insert meaningful human intervention into the loop.
Not Google, but a few months back I suddenly couldn't post on Twitter. Why? Who knows. I don't really do politics on Twitter and certainly don't post borderline content in general. I opened a support ticket and a follow-up one and it got cleared about a week later. Never found out a reason. I could probably have pulled strings if I had to but fortunately didn't need to. But, yeah, you can just randomly lose access to things because some algorithm woke up on the wrong side of the bed.
>said scale also makes it nearly impossible--or at least unprofitable--to insert meaningful human intervention into the loop.
Retail and hotels and restaurants can insert meaningful human intervention with less than 5% profit margins, but a company with consistent $400k+ profit per employee per quarter can not?
https://csimarket.com/stocks/singleEfficiencyeit.php?code=GO...
This is what I'm talking about in my original comment about the malice and stupidity aphorism.
Someone or some team of people is making the conscious decision that the extra profit from not having human intervention is worth more than avoiding the harm caused to innocent parties.
This is not a retail establishment barely surviving due to intense competition that may have false positives every now and then because it's not feasible to catch 100% of the errors.
This is an organization that has consistently shown they value higher profits due to higher efficiencies from automation more than giving up even an ounce of that to prevent destroying some people's livelihoods. And they're not going to state that on their "About Us" page on their website. But we can reasonably deduce it from their consistent actions over 10+ years.
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I was just paying a bill online.
I had loading images turned off in my browser.
So I get the checkbox captcha thing, and checking it is not enough, so I have to click on taxis, etc. Which didn't initially show because of images being off.
I eventually did turn on images for the site and reload it. But at first, I was like "wait a minute, why should I have to have images on to pay a bill?" and I clicked a bunch of things I'd never tried before to see if there was an alternative. It appears that you have to be able to do either the image captcha or some sort of auditory thing. I guess accessibility doesn't include Helen Keller, or to someone who has both images and speaker turned off (which I have done at some times).
Maybe this is hard for someone younger to understand, but when I was first using computers, many had neither high quality graphics nor audio - that was a special advanced thing called "multimedia". It feels like something is severely wrong with the world if that is now a requirement to interact and do basic stuff online.
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I would agree. It's not useful in the context of remediation or defense, but on a human emotional level it's extremely helpful.
When Google kills your business it doesn't help your business to assume no malice, but it may help you not feel as personally insulted, which ultimately is worth a lot to the human experience.
Humans can be totally happy living in poverty if they feel loved and validated, or totally miserable living as Kings if they feel they are surrounded by backstabbers and plotters. Intent doesn't matter to outcome, but it sure does to the way we feel about it.
The saying is for your own sanity. If you go around assuming every mistake is malicious, it’s going to fuck up your interactions with the world.
Everyone I know who approaches the world with a me vs. them mentality appears to be constantly fraught with the latest pile of actors “trying to fuck them”.
It’s an angry, depressing life when you think that the teller at the grocery store is literally trying to steal from you when they accidentally double scan something.
One does not have to choose between assuming everything is malice or everything is stupid. Situations in the real world are more nuanced, and hence the saying is inane.
It’s not though. Assuming malice is incorrect 99.9% of the time and correctly identifying that other fraction offers so little upside. What good does it do to realize earlier that the person is malicious and not incompetent?
I think you have a point, and it's important to not be naive as people out there will steamroll those around them if given the opportunity. Personally I try to not immediately assume malice because I've found it leads to conspiracy-minded thinking, where everything bad is due to some evil "them" pulling the strings. While I'm sure there are some real "Mr. Burns" types out there, I can't help but feel most people (including groups of them as corporations) are just acting in self-interest, often stumbling while they do it.
It's a truism not because people are never malicious, but because we tend to see agency where there is none. Accidents are seen as intentional. This tendency leads to conspiracy theories, superstitions, magical thinking, etc. We're strongly biased towards interpreting hurtful actions as malice.