Also, Hanlon’s Razor applies to individuals.
A small child dropping a glass? An adult causing an accident? Sure, that’s incompetence.
A company shipping a bad product that kills people? Malice, and Greed. They could afford someone to check that people don’t get hurt, they profit from the misery.
If your ignorance causes harm you get at most one strike
If you continue to choose harmful ignorance in the face of truth, you are simply malicious
I’m not saying ignorant people are malicious; just that malicious people tend to be ignorant.
I think ignorance of things like the value of life or the individuality of others excuses them from the empathy we have for the stupid
That can be corrected though, it’s willful ignorance should not be tolerated.
can it? I’ve never been able to convince someone that other people exist and have value. it seems like people who grow up without that tend to stay that way. how do you correct that?
The person has to want to be better. Not everyone does. Especially when their faults form part of their identity.
I guess when I meet adults like that this is usually the case
It seems to be, increasingly, the case in my experience too.
malicious people tend to be ignorant.
That’s just you interpreting the ignorance as malice.
Ignorance and malice, on subject/circumstance X, are mutually exclusive. One requires knowledge to be malicious—in other words, one can’t act with malice unless one knows and understands what they are inflicting upon the ‘target’.
And ignorance is by definition a lack of knowledge.
One can be maliciously ignorant. Aware of one’s ignorance and refusing to do anything about it.
Anti-science religious people for example.
Aware of one’s ignorance and refusing to do anything about it.
This isn’t malice.
I’m aware that I’m ignorant in matters of quantum mechanics, and I’m deliberately keeping it that way, because I’m simply not interested in learning about it.
That’s not malicious of me.
You may be interpreting that sort of thing as malicious when the thing the person is ignorant of is something that you believe they should want to learn about (which is a subjective matter by definition). But that doesn’t change the motivation of the person’s actions—it’s their motivation, and nothing else, that determines whether an act is malicious, not how you feel about it.
I’m aware that I’m ignorant in matters of quantum mechanics, and I’m deliberately keeping it that way, because I’m simply not interested in learning about it.
That’s not malicious of me.
I agree. Entirely.
If you were to then advocate against QM, decrying it as nonsense, that would be malicious ignorance.
An example from my own school years might help. I had some smart (genuinely very clever) friends, they were evangelical Christians, which was fine until we start studying evolution in biology. They literally repeatedly stood up in class and shouted that there’s “no proof of evolution” and got very angry. They did this because their child-aged minds couldn’t reconcile their faith in their literal interpretation of their holy book and scientific evidence. They reaction was to maliciously attack science as a whole. That is malicious ignorance.
A counter example is a colleague from years ago, a young-earther Christian, never once attacked any contrary opinions or statements. He was really cool, open and honest about what he believed, had absolute confidence in his faith, didn’t push that on anyone.
I’m not trying to claim that all ignorance is malicious, and apologize if that’s how my previous argument has come across.
Malice and ignorance often go hand in hand.
They literally can’t—malice requires knowledge, and ignorance is lack of knowledge.
When committing a harmful act, either you know (malice) or don’t know (ignorance) that it’s harmful.
malice requires knowledge
No it doesn’t. Proof: all of human history
Your weekly reminder that Marie-Antoinette didn’t have much to do with the famine in France and that “let them eat cake” is ahistorical.
My only issue with Hanlon is that many bots are out there and ones that have bad intent. IRL I think it applies, but various populated online spaces I feel different about.
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When you look at figures like Trump or Boslonaro and their respective cronies, intentional malice is the only explanation
Hanlon’s razor doesn’t apply to politicians or the rich
hanlon’s razor doesn’t apply to politicians because they are paid to know the stuff they’re talking about.
hanlon’s razor doesn’t apply to the rich because their common narrative is that they deserve that position of wealth and power because they’re so intelligent and reasonable and such. so they better know their stuff.
Willful ignorance… IS negligence
oooooooh no, there’s plenty of people who really are just that dumb. my mother for example. you can explain the same thing to her a thousand times and she will still not get the even most basic stuff, as long as she just doesn’t want to understand them, for whatever reason. don’t assume malice, assume a missing brain or sth
“Indistinguishable from malice” doesn’t mean they’re malicious. It means their ignorance is causing harm as if they were malicious.
Like say if someone didn’t understand vaccines to such an extent that they voted to remove them. Causing harm.
there is simply no way to become that ignorant
This makes zero sense. It’s impossible to become ignorant. This is just rationalizing a justification to label ignorance as malice.
Ignorance is the default state, the starting point.
