Hanlan’s Razor is one of my favorite mental models.
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
I grew up with several conspiracy-minded relatives, and this one idea did more than anything else to help me see other possible explanations beyond a secret cabal.
It also made me a far easier person to work with since it helped me see certain relationships at work as something other than adversarial relationships.
I often contemplate what most TV shows and movies would look like if a character’s best friend would, at a key moment, step in and ask them if they’d ever heard of Hanlan’s Razor.
In my fantasies, the main character understands and goes on a completely different course with more empathy for the other person. In a more realistic depiction, the best friend probably gets their head chewed off.
Today I discovered a different side of Hanlan’s Razor that might be worth calling the Forest Gump Principle.
In the movie Forest Gump, the main character Forest bumbles into important historical moments. It’s not so much that he is a genius, quite the opposite, but he does some incredible things through luck and timing.
One of my favorite examples is when Forest stays at the Watergate Hotel one night and calls the front desk to tell them about the power being out, eventually leading to Nixon’s resignation.
So my proposal for the Inverse Hanlan’s Razor is
Never attribute to good intentions that which is adequately explained by dumb luck.
It turns out that determining people’s intentions is really hard, even when it’s ourselves. I don’t know that moving entirely to consequentialist thinking is the correct answer, but heavily discounting our assumptions of people’s intentions is probably a good rule of thumb.
Dan Cook 