Hanlon’s Razor

Hanlon’s Razor isn’t quite right

PNRJ core principles, current events, ethics, politics, public policy, tribal paradigm , , , , , , , , , , ,

Sep 27 JDN 2461311

Hanlon’s Razor tells us:

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

This is almost right. In fact, it is close enough to right to be useful at solving the problem it was meant to solve. However, I have a different maxim that I believe improves upon it:

Never attribute to coordinated conspiracy that which is adequately explained by uncoordinated malice and/or stupidity.

This is also related to another maxim I have read, Grey’s Law:

Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.

The problem that Hanlon’s Razor exists to solve, I believe, is the fact that many people are innately conspiracy-minded: Whenever something bad happens, they like to attribute it to the mysterious workings of some coordinated cabal of evildoers.

But this is in fact a very improbable explanation; our prior probability on it should be quite low. Not zero, as coordinated conspiracies do happen on occasion; but low, as they don’t happen very often—and the larger and longer the conspiracy required to explain the outcome, the lower we should the probability. (Three evil people coordinating for a few weeks happens all the time. Three thousand evil people coordinating for ten years is almost impossible.)

Yet malice is not actually all that improbable. About 1% of men are full-blown psychopaths and 10% have psychopathic tendencies, and about 8% of men are rapists. Since psychopaths seem to be overrepresented in positions of power, the prior probability that a given CEO or head of state is a psychopath is more like 5%. So when a corporation or a government does something horrific, yes, stupidity is very likely to be involved—but so is malice.

If we follow Hanlon’s Razor too closely, we begin to look for reasons why horrible things are not the true intentions of the people who do them, when sometimes the cruelty is the point. We come to imagine that our enemies are simply foolish and benighted, and if we simply told them the truth they would be enlightened.

This is in fact how I used to think. The last decade proved me wrong.

It seems deeply ironic; when I was a teenager, I thought the world’s conflicts were fundamentally complicated and required nuanced understanding of multiple perspectives in order to resolve. But everything that Donald Trump and the Republicans who have enabled him have done over the last ten years has shown me that this is simply not always true. My naivete of youth was in being too charitable.

Sometimes the other side is just evil. Sometimes they really are motivated by nothing but craven selfishness, misogyny, xenophobia, and racism. Sometimes our leaders really are willing to support a corrupt, incompetent, deceitful, malevolent, racist, misogynist, fascist, pedophile rapist. (Are they corrupt? Has he threatened them? Are they doing this because they still somehow think he’ll be good for the economy? Do they simply hate the same people he hates? Does it even matter anymore? Someone who supports a fascist because he was bribed or thinks it will be good for the economy is still supporting a fascist.)

While I cannot say all his millions of supporters are evil, their failure at this point seems to go beyond any ordinary stupidity. It requires either that they do not know how terrible he is—which would require such profound willfull ignorance or gullibility that it is almost unfathomable to me—or that they do not care—which would make them so totally callous or misguided that in fact I should probably simply call them evil after all. Fortunately they only comprise about 40% of Americans, roughly the proportion who think the Earth is less than 10,000 years old—and yes, the two beliefs are very strongly correlated. So maybe they really, truly are that ignorant and gullible. They have been convinced of absurdities and so will happily excuse atrocities. Perhaps there is still some way to reach them, but I do not know what it is, and I do not think we have time to find out.

Sometimes our enemies cannot be reasoned with, and must simply be defeated—hopefully at the ballot box, but if it comes to it, sometimes even on the battlefield. (To be clear: I am not suggesting a violent overthrow of Donald Trump. I want Democrats to win both houses of Congress and remove him from office. But if they try to remove him and he refuses to be removed, or if he refuses to cede power to whoever wins in 2028, then yes, it would then be time to solve this conflict with guns.)


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Depression and the War on Drugs

PNRJ cognitive science, current events, politics, public policy , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Jan 7 JDN 2460318

There exists, right now, an extremely powerful antidepressant which is extremely cheap and has minimal side effects.

It’s so safe that it has no known lethal dose, and—unlike SSRIs—it is not known to trigger suicide. It is shockingly effective: it works in a matter of hours—not weeks like a typical SSRI—and even a single moderate dose can have benefits lasting months. It isn’t patented, because it comes from a natural source. That natural source is so easy to grow, you can do it by yourself at home for less than $100.

Why in the world aren’t we all using it?

I’ll tell you why: This wonder drug is called psilocybin. It is a Schedule I narcotic, which means that simply possessing it is a federal crime in the United States. Carrying it across the border is a felony.

It is also illegal in most other countries, including the UK, Australia, Belgium, Finland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway (#ScandinaviaIsNotAlwaysBetter), France, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Japan, the list goes on….

Actually, it’s faster to list the places it’s not illegal: Austria, the Bahamas, Brazil, the British Virgin Islands, Jamaica, Nepal, the Netherlands, and Samoa. That’s it for true legalization, though it’s also decriminalized or unenforced in some other countries.

The best known antidepressant lies unused, because we made it illegal.

Similar stories hold for other amazingly beneficial drugs:

LSD also has powerful antidepressant effects with minimal side effects, and is likewise so ludicrously safe that we are not aware of a single fatal overdose ever happening in any human being. And it’s also Schedule I banned.

Ahayuasca is the same story: A great antidepressant, very safe, minimal side effects—and highly illegal.

There is also no evidence that psilocybin, LSD, or ahayuasca are addictive; and far from promoting the sort of violent, anti-social behavior that alcohol does, they actually seem to make people more compassionate.

This is pure speculation, but I think we should try psilocybin as a possible treatment for psychopathy. And if that works, maybe having a psilocybin trip should be a prerequisite for eligibility for any major elected office. (I often find it a bit silly how the biggest fans of psychedelics talk about the drugs radically changing the world, bringing peace and prosperity through a shift in consciousness; but if psilocybin could make all the world’s leaders more compassionate, that might actually have that kind of impact.)

Ketamine and MDMA at least do have some overdose risk and major side effects, and are genuinely addictive—but it’s not really clear that they’re any worse than SSRIs, and they certainly aren’t any worse than alcohol.

Alcohol may actually be the most widely-used antidepressant, and yet is clearly utterly ineffective; in fact, alcoholics consistently show depression increasing over time. Alcohol has a fatal dose so low it’s a common accident; it is also implicated in violent behavior, including half of all rapes—and in the majority of those rape cases, all consumption of alcohol was voluntary.

Yet alcohol can be bought over-the-counter at any grocery store.

The good news is that this is starting to change.

Recent changes in the law have allowed the use of psychedelic drugs in medical research—which is part of how we now know just how shockingly effective they are at treating depression.

Some jurisdictions in the US—notably, the whole state of Colorado—have decriminalized psilocybin, and Oregon has made it outright legal. Yet even this situation is precarious; just as has occurred with cannabis legalization, it’s still difficult to run a business selling psilocybin even in Oregon, because banks don’t want to deal with a business that sells something which is federally illegal.

Fortunately, this, too, is starting to change: A bill passed the US Senate a few months ago that would legalize banking to cannabis businesses in states where it is legal, and President Biden recently pardoned everyone in federal prison for simple cannabis possession. Now, why can’t we just make cannabis legal!?

The War on Drugs hasn’t just been a disaster for all the thousands of people needlessly imprisoned.

(Of course they had it the worst, and we should set them all free immediately—preferably with some form of restitution.)

The War of Drugs has also been a disaster for all the people who couldn’t get the treatment they needed, because we made that medicine illegal.

And for what? What are we even trying to accomplish here?

Prohibition was a failure—and a disaster of its own—but I can at least understand why it was done. When a drug kills nearly a hundred thousand people a year and is implicated in half of all rapes, that seems like a pretty damn good reason to want that drug gone. The question there becomes how we can best reduce alcohol use without the awful consequences that Prohibition caused—and so far, really high taxes seem to be the best method, and they absolutely do reduce crime.

But where was the disaster caused by cannabis, psilocybin, or ahayuasca? These drugs are made by plants and fungi; like alcohol, they have been used by humans for thousands of years. Where are the overdoses? Where is the crime? Psychedelics have none of these problems.

Honestly, it’s kind of amazing that these drugs aren’t more associated with organized crime than they are.

When alcohol was banned, it seemed to immediately trigger a huge expansion of the Mafia, as only they were willing and able to provide for the enormous demand of this highly addictive neurotoxin. But psilocybin has been illegal for decades, and yet there’s no sign of organized crime having anything to do with it. In fact, psilocybin use is associated with lower rates of arrest—which actually makes sense to me, because like I said, it makes you more compassionate.

That’s how idiotic and ridiculous our drug laws are:

We made a drug that causes crime legal, and we made a drug that prevents crime illegal.

Note that this also destroys any conspiracy theory suggesting that the government wants to keep us all docile and obedient: psilocybin is way better at making people docile than alcohol. No, this isn’t the product of some evil conspiracy.

Hanlon’s Razor: Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity.

This isn’t malice; it’s just massive, global, utterly catastrophic stupidity.

I might attribute this to Puritanical American attitude toward pleasure (Pleasure is suspect, pleasure is dangerous), but I don’t think of Sweden as particularly Puritanical, and they also ban most psychedelics. I guess the most libertine countries—the Netherlands, Brazil—seem to be the ones that have legalized them; but it doesn’t really seem like one should have to be that libertine to want the world’s cheapest, safest, most effective antidepressants to be widely available. I have very mixed feelings about Amsterdam’s (in)famous red light district, but absolutely no hesitation in supporting their legalization of psilocybin truffles.

Honestly, I think patriarchy might be part of this. Alcohol is seen as a very masculine drug—maybe because it can make you angry and violent. Psychedelics seem more feminine; they make you sensitive, compassionate and loving.

Even the way that psychedelics make you feel more connected with your body is sort of feminine; we seem to have a common notion that men are their minds, but women are their bodies.

Here, try it. Someone has said, “I feel really insecure about my body.” Quick: What is that person’s gender? Now suppose someone has said, “I’m very proud of my mind.” What is that person’s gender?

(No, it’s not just because the former is insecure and the latter is proud—though we do also gender those emotions, and there’s statistical evidence that men are generally more confident, though that’s never been my experience of manhood. Try it with the emotions swapped and it still works, just not quite as well.)

I’m not suggesting that this makes sense. Both men and women are precisely as physical and mental as each other—we are all both, and that is a deep truth about our nature. But I know that my mind makes an automatic association between mind/body and male/female, and I suspect yours does as well, because we came from similar cultural norms. (This goes at least back to Classical Rome, where the animus, the rational soul, was masculine, while the anima, the emotional one, was feminine.)

That is, it may be that we banned psychedelics because they were girly. The men in charge were worried about us becoming soft and weak. The drug that’s tied to thousands of rapes and car collisions is manly. The drug that brings you peace, joy, and compassion is not.

Think about the things that the mainstream objected to about Hippies: Men with long hair and makeup, women wearing pants, bright colors, flowery patterns, kindness and peacemongering—all threats to the patriarchal order.

Whatever it is, we need to stop. Millions of people are suffering, and we could so easily help them; all we need to do is stop locking people up for taking medicine.