heuristics Archives

Hanlon’s Razor advises us, “Do not attribute to malice that which can be explained by stupidity.” Or incompetence, which serves as a fine substitute for stupidity. There are several ways to phrase Hanlon’s Razor, but the basic idea is that a given snafu is more likely to be explained by idiocy than by evil intent. It’s a corollary of Occam’s Razor. Wikipedia speculates on the saying’s origin.

The point is not that malice is never ever the explanation. The point is that malice is so infrequently the explanation that a heuristic ruling it out will be more accurate. Based on anecdotal evidence, I think this is true. The average person is a moron who means well, and even above-average people can easily fuck things up. Especially when it comes to complex systems, and almost everything the government does involves complex system.

Designing incentives is a process fraught with hard-to-foresee errors. But hey, maybe the artificial intelligence that’s able to trounce poker champions will also be able to easily evaluate all the perverse responses humans might have to a given regulatory scheme. Ha — I know. That’ll be the day!

(Allow me a political moment: Trump and his administration’s actions so far are probably better explained by stupidity than malice. They think they’re in the right, and they expect to do well. But actualizing that hope is quite difficult. Yes, Steve Bannon may throw a wrench in this theory — he has shown signs of being biased toward chaos.)

So. Allow me to propose another corollary to Occam and Hanlon’s Razors:

Never attribute to malice or stupidity that which can be explained by incentives.

People do what benefits them. Gentiles sell out Jews when it benefits them. Reduced competition boosts wages. Native sons — of all sorts — sell out immigrants — of all sorts — because it benefits them. For the same reasons! Economics runs in the blood of every one of us, but it expresses itself via competing egregores. My ideology trumps yours due to reason, not because I want your crops and your blood! That has nothing to do with anything.

Right? Yes, of course. The ones who are right will devour what’s left.

Tweet by @ClarkHat.

Header photo by dad1_.

A system is an arrangement of interlocking elements or moving parts that all affect each other, sometimes recursively. The world is full of them (and in fact each of those systems is itself an element of the larger system that comprises the whole universe).

Mathias Lafeldt wrote about how the human mind copes with this:

“Systems are invisible to our eyes. We try to understand them indirectly through mental models and then perform actions based on these models. […] Our built-in pattern detector is able to simplify complexity into manageable decision rules.”

Lafeldt’s explanation reminds me of the saying that the map is not the territory. Reality (which is a system) is the territory. Our mental models are maps that help us navigate that territory.

Artwork by Kyung-Min Chung.

But no map is a 1:1 representation of reality — that would be a duplicate, or a simulation. Rather, our maps give us heuristics for interpreting the lay of the land, so to speak, and rules for how to react to what we encounter. Maps are produced by fallible humans, so they contain inaccuracies. Often they don’t handle edge cases well (or at all).

Nevertheless, I like mental models. They cut through all the epistemological bullshit. Instead of optimizing a mental model to be true, you optimize it to be useful. An effective mental model is one that helps you be, well, more effective.

This is why Occam’s Razor is so popular despite being incorrect much of the time. Some plans do go off without a hitch. But expecting the chaotic worst is a socioeconomically adaptive behavior, so we keep the idea around. [Edit: Hilariously, I mixed up Occam’s Razor and Murphy’s Law — thereby demonstrating Murphy’s Law.]

My personal favorite mental model is a simple one: “There are always tradeoffs.” One of the tradeoffs of using mental models at all is that you sacrifice understanding the full complexity of a situation. Mental models, like maps, hide the genuine texture of the ground. In return they give you efficiency.

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