It feels like lately there are people committing malice knowingly trying to justify it as just a joke or unknowingly doing something from stupidity to make it more palatable to people that will then excuse them.
I think this rule may have always been fake when anyone with even a little bit of power did it.
I've never understood why this is taken seriously. Law has clear concepts of bad faith and mens rea, and this implies they're irrelevant.
Of course it's unproductive to start from assumptions of bad faith, which is a fair point. Bad faith requires evidence of intent, stupidity doesn't.
But there are still situations where bad faith is a reasonable hypothesis to test. And some negative actors are clever enough to operate deliberately inside a zone of plausible deniability.
Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice. If you are the editor of Gray’s Anatomy, incompetence is malice.
> incompetence is malice
A subtle distinction, but I'd flip this as "malice is incompetence".
Both ring true, in this case.
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor
Keep word: adequately. This is not adequately explained by stupidity.
It feels like lately there are people committing malice knowingly trying to justify it as just a joke or unknowingly doing something from stupidity to make it more palatable to people that will then excuse them.
I think this rule may have always been fake when anyone with even a little bit of power did it.
It does occur to me that you can be both malicious and stupid at the same time.
"Ripped from the headlines!"
I've never understood why this is taken seriously. Law has clear concepts of bad faith and mens rea, and this implies they're irrelevant.
Of course it's unproductive to start from assumptions of bad faith, which is a fair point. Bad faith requires evidence of intent, stupidity doesn't.
But there are still situations where bad faith is a reasonable hypothesis to test. And some negative actors are clever enough to operate deliberately inside a zone of plausible deniability.
> adequately explained by stupidity
What is the adequate explanation via stupidity in this case though? If there is one that sure maybe we should lean that way without further evidence.
This gets complicated when the malicious have also read the saying and intentionally feign stupidity, but that's just chaos politics.