Hanlon's Razor

Overview

Before assuming someone hurt you on purpose, construct the version where they made a mistake — and see how much evidence it explains. The razor is a Bayesian prior, not a proof; override it when concrete evidence of malice arrives. Human attribution systematically over-weights intent (fundamental attribution error); most hostile-seeming acts are incompetence, miscommunication, or asymmetric information.

Composes with bayesian-reasoning, abductive-reasoning, occams-razor, critical-thinking.

When to Use

• You feel an emotional pull toward "they did this on purpose"
• You're about to escalate on the assumption of malice
• A pattern of bad outcomes is being framed as a coordinated attack
• A team is in conflict and each side believes the other is acting in bad faith
• An AI model's harmful/biased output or a competitor's surprising AI move is being read as deliberate malice rather than an emergent bug, honest error, or ordinary self-interested competition

Not when: concrete evidence of malicious intent exists; cost of being wrong is catastrophic; power imbalance makes "they probably didn't mean it" an abuse-enabling stance.

Coaching Novices (Adaptive Front Door)