stupidity

Hanlon’s Razor isn’t quite right

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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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Why being a scientist means confronting your own ignorance

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I read an essay today arguing that scientists should be stupid. Or more precisely, ignorant. Or even more precisely, they should recognize their ignorance when all others ignore and turn away.

What does it feel like to be wrong?

It doesn’t feel like anything. Most people are wrong most of the time without realizing it. (Explained brilliantly in this TED talk.)

What does it feel like to be proven wrong, to find out you were confused or ignorant?

It hurts, a great deal. And most people flinch away from this. They would rather continue being wrong than experience the feeling of being proven wrong.

But being proven wrong is the only way to become less wrong. Being proven ignorant is the only way to truly attain knowledge.

I once heard someone characterize the scientific temperament as “being comfortable not knowing”. No, no, no! Just the opposite, in fact. The unscientific temperament is being comfortable not knowing, being fine with your infinite ignorance as long as you can go about your day. The scientific temperament is being so deeply  uncomfortable not knowing that it overrides the discomfort everyone feels when their beliefs are proven wrong. It is to have a drive to actually know—not to think you know, not to feel as if you know, not to assume you know and never think about it, but to actually know—that is so strong it pushes you through all the pain and doubt and confusion of actually trying to find out.

An analogy I like to use is The Armor of Truth. Suppose you were presented with a piece of armor, The Armor of Truth, which is claimed to be indestructible. You will have the chance to wear this armor into battle; if it is indeed indestructible, you will be invincible and will surely prevail. But what if it isn’t? What if it has some weakness you aren’t aware of? Then it could fail and you could die.

How would you go about determining whether The Armor of Truth is really what it is claimed to be? Would you test it with things you expect it to survive? Would you brush it with feathers, pour glasses of water on it, poke it with your finger? Would you seek to confirm your belief in its indestructibility? (As confirmation bias would have you do?) No, you would test it with things you expect to destroy it; you’d hit it with everything you have. You’re fire machine guns at it, drop bombs on it, pour acid on it, place it in a nuclear testing site. You’d do everything you possibly could to falsify your belief in the armor’s indestructibility. And only when you failed, only after you had tried everything you could think of to destroy the armor and it remained undented and unscratched, would you begin to believe that it is truly indestructible. (Popper was exaggerating when he said all science is based on falsification; but he was not exaggerating very much.)

Science is The Armor of Truth, and we wear it into battle—but now the analogy begins to break down, for our beliefs are within us, they are part of us. We’d like to be able to point the machineguns at armor far away from us, but instead it is as if we are forced to wear the armor as the guns are fired. When a break in the armor is found and a bullet passes through—a belief we dearly held is proven false—it hurts us, and we wish we could find another way to test it. But we can’t; and if we fail to test it now, it will only endanger us later—confront a false belief with reality enough and it will eventually fail. A scientist is someone who accepts this and wears the armor bravely as the test guns blaze.

Being a scientist means confronting your own ignorance: Not accepting it, but also not ignoring it; confronting it. Facing it down. Conquering it. Destroying it.