Comment by Eridrus
1 day ago
This is a fairly common view, but it overstates people's rationality abd assumes you have perfect information, leading people to pretty conspiratorial views.
Often the actual answer to things not making sense is that most things in the world are done poorly and many things are some mish mash of various interests rather than a singular actor.
Incompetence is far more common than malice, and many observers are themselves incompetent.
So Occam's razor then? That's a fair point. I'm torn between how much my instinct is to ascribe things to incompetence, malice, or profiteering...
Hanlon's razor: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." Occam's razor is "the simplest explanation is most likely to be true". Hanlon's razor is a special case of Occam's razor if you assume that stupidity is simpler than malice, which is a hard statement to prove in concrete terms, but intuitively seems to be true.
Stupidity is simpler than malice because a plan that seems dumb would need to be far more complex to be secretly smart and malicious than to just actually be dumb.
Ah yes, the wrong razor. Or, like you say, a more general version of it that might still apply (but wasn't the one I was thinking of).