The idea of Hanlon’s razor has me confused, it seems to be just pessimism but is different?
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“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity”
If anything I’d call this more optimistic than pessimistic. Hanlon’s Razor is saying that often people will look at something they view as abhorrent and say “These people are evil”, when in actual fact it is just stupidity. Ie, stupidity can often look the same as villainy: When someone does a bad thing, they didn’t necessarily intend to do a bad thing, they were just being stupid or misinformed. Hanlon’s Razor is saying that our first assumption when someone does something that *looks* evil should be to say that that person is stupid, rather than that that person is evil.
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