Hanlon’s Razor and assumed intent

Ben Tyson
Ben Tyson
Aug 24, 2017 · 4 min read

A friend sent me a link to Farnam Street’s Mental Models blogs the other week. I love the whole idea of it and it put a name on something I’ve been trying to practice for a few years. I mean, this sums it up:

You can’t really know anything if you just remember isolated facts and try and bang ’em back. If the facts don’t hang together on a latticework of theory, you don’t have them in a usable form.

Take. My. Money.

The only thing to do was to start working my way through these mental models. It only took four models before I reached one that did exactly what was promised — blasted some clarity on a series of thoughts I’d been having recently.

Hanlon’s Razor states that we should not attribute to malice that which is more easily explained by stupidity.

Put simply, when something goes wrong — and let’s face it, in life things are going wrong all the time — you should give benefit of the doubt. There is a far higher likelihood that stupidity is the cause, rather than malicious intent.

Apply this to some real situations and its sheer simplicity (that’s just common sense, right?) is its beauty.

Scenario: Someone arrives half an hour late to your meeting. What’s your reaction? The absolute bastard. Do they not know how precious your time is this week, and how much other work you have to do? You didn’t even want to meet them, it was a favour to your friend. And now, you’ll never get that time back.

Of course, there are thousands of possible reasons why they were so late. But if you let the chimp subside and think about it: for every scenario where they chose to delay their arrival as some dominance-asserting power play, there are hundreds of innocent reasons. Maybe they got lost, maybe the tubes were delayed, the traffic was awful. Maybe they witnessed a cyclist being hit by a taxi and had to perform CPR (this exact example has happened to me).

David Foster Wallace described these two ways of thinking about experiences — about life, even — more poetically than I ever could.

David Foster Wallace’s take on Hanlon’s Razor

Apply it to your personal experiences and this idea becomes even clearer. Think of the last time you were blamed for something going wrong — at work, at home, wherever. Did you deserve the blame? Did you set out with sabotage in your heart? Or did circumstances conspire against you? Was there any way the outcome could even have been avoided?

Hanlon called it “stupidity”, Napoleon preferred “incompetence” when talking about this concept, Goethe was probably most generous by allowing for “misunderstandings and neglect”. A lot of people might just say, all you’re describing is empathy. Emotional Intelligence. “EQ”. And that’s fine. There are any number of ways you can shape it to suit you. The version I like is this: never assume bad intent.

Trying to think more like this in more of the mini-crises each day is a path to better relationships. And the more you practice it yourself, the more you’ll see others around you adopt it with you.


There is one essential thing missing that takes this beyond just turn the other cheek.

Lack of malice — or assumed good intent — doesn’t mean innocence. That person was still late for the meeting with you and they have wasted your time. There are likely to be very good reasons for it. But they have to take responsibility for the outcome nonetheless.

In my world of digital marketing I look at a fuck up like Google running several huge brand’s advertising next to extremist videos on YouTube and see this.

No matter the outrage those brands — and seemingly the whole advertising industry too — felt about that, you’ve got to assume that Google didn’t place those adverts on purpose. I know many see evil in the tech giants of today, but that would just be terrible for business.

The only reasonable assumption is that Google had a poor filter to stop extremist content appearing, and a not-clever-enough (or, stupid?) algorithm that placed those adverts next to them.

However, that doesn’t absolve them of responsibility. Assuming that Google didn’t have bad intent in all this doesn’t mean they just shrug it off. It happened on their watch, and fault or not it’s a serious betrayal of the trust of their customers.

Or look at the recent Grenfell Tower tragedy in London you can see this at play again. While the Inquiry is yet to present its findings, it seems clear that austerity under the national and local governments of the past decade will lie at the heart of why the fire ended up so deadly.

If, or when, that’s found to be the case they will need to take absolute responsibility for it. They didn’t light the fire, they likely made those cuts to try and continue being able to fund the NHS, or schools, or the benefits system. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t responsible.

Lack of malice doesn’t mean innocence.

Applying this to more everyday scenarios — like those we thought about earlier — is crucial when applying Hanlon’s Razor properly.


One final addendum. This whole theory is a probability thing.

There is malice in the world. There is bad intent. Evil. Whatever you want to call it. Need examples? Really? Thought not.

The point is that when you’re making an assessment of any single scenario, the odds are that someone acted with good intent rather than any malice.

Go forth and assume.

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Thanks to Callum McCahon

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