[konjin]

The people who use Hanlon's razor to explain away malice are both incompetent and malicious. Only someone who is an idiot would ever think to use 'I'm very stupid' as an excuse or explanation why they did something very damaging. If you are smart enough to realize you are incompetent after the fact you were smart enough to realize it before the fact, and that means you were malicious in not recusing yourself.

[harmful_stereo]

The way this was stated in one discrete thought leads me to a problem with human nature i dwell on: how much of what our society and culture is, and what authority is, is just a effort to disguise our frailty and fallibility? It is tremendously hard to be reliable and competitive across multiple disciplines and for the majority of tasks involved in basic human life. There is too big a trade off between available time and location and doing any task well. We are primarily hunting-gathering the easiest ways to meet our needs. How can you blame people for not recusing themselves from participating or misrepresenting themselves as competent when our culture values that and expresses it so dramatically at the highest levels of public performance,from IPOs to high office and everywhere else. Storytelling in the tradition of the heroic myth is mostly about becoming qualified to assume a social role, as an upward stuggle.

It seems built into human character to bite off far more than we can chew, as in free real estate, and then leverage the social value of holding something others are willing to compete for. I think it amounts to a social survival instinct, and i lament how there's very little chance of discouraging people from doing it because of the potential payoff. If anything i think it's a failure of institutions for being built to exploit that competition rather than guard against its excesses.

[Fannon]

Imho we also tend to underestimate the impact of cognitive biases on our own views and behaviors. We are often largely unaware of this. In this case, I find that Hanlon's razor is to simple with the black and white distinction of incompetence and malice. Biases often fall in neither category.

People who view themself as rational / technical might be even more prone to not realizing how much they are affected by this? If your self-image is that you are very rational person (more rational than others), you might be especially prone to denying and therefore not being aware of biases.