Sometimes it really is a typo
The inverse razor cuts both ways: a note on not becoming the thing you mock.
A blog with this name owes you one post in the other direction, so here it is.
The failure mode of Hanlon’s razor is naivety: waving away engineered outcomes as accidents because accidents are more comfortable. The failure mode of the inverse razor is paranoia: seeing a roadmap behind every outage, a dark pattern behind every bad UI, an enemy behind every incident. Both failure modes feel like insight from the inside.
So, a few honest constraints this blog will try to hold itself to:
- Incentives are a search heuristic, not a verdict. “Who benefits?” tells you where to dig. It does not tell you what you’ll find. Plenty of failures benefit someone by pure accident.
- Malice needs a mechanism. If the malicious explanation requires a meeting where twelve people agreed to do the bad thing and nobody leaked it, weigh that against the explanation where one tired engineer fat-fingered a deploy on a Friday. Conspiracies have coordination costs; entropy is free.
- Retractions are content. When a post here turns out to be wrong — when the suspicious failure gets a boring root cause — the correction gets published with the same energy as the accusation. That’s the price of the brand.
The goal was never “assume malice.” The goal is to refuse the comfortable stopping point. Incompetence and malice aren’t mutually exclusive anyway — the most durable bad systems are the ones where nobody has to intend the harm for the harm to keep landing, quarter after quarter, in the same profitable place.
Assume the worst. Verify. Publish either way.