zlacker

It's the correct counter-strategy to people who believe that you shouldn't attribute to malice what could be attributed to stupidity (and who don't update that prior for their history with a particular actor).

And it works in part because things often are accidents - enough to give plausible deniability and room to interpret things favorably if you want to. I've seen this from the inside. Here are two HN threads about times my previous company was exposing (or was planning to expose) data users didn't want us to: [1] [2]

Without reading our responses in the comments, can you tell which one was deliberate and which one wasn't? It's not easy to tell with the information you have available from the outside. The comments and eventual resolutions might tell you, but the initial apparent act won't. (For the record, [1] was deliberate and [2] was not.)

[1] >>23279837

[2] >>31769601

>>rachof+(OP)
Well, in this case, you have the CEO saying basically they didn’t know about it until about a month ago and then Vox brings receipts with docs signed by Altman and Friends showing he and others signed off on the policy originally (or at least as of the date of the doc, which is about a year ago for one of them). And we have several layers of evidence from several different directions accumulating and indicating that Altman is (and this is a considered choice of words) a malicious shitbag. That seems to qualify as a pretty solid exception to the general rule that you cite of not attributing to malice etc.

>>rachof+(OP)
Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but this seems straightforward: the first link goes to an email that went out announcing a change, which seems pretty deliberate; nobody writes an announcement that they're introducing a bug. The second change doesn't seem to have been announced, which leaves open the possibility that it's accidental.

Although I suppose someone could claim the email was sent by mistake, and some deliberate changes aren't announced.

>>rachof+(OP)
> you shouldn't attribute to malice what could be attributed to stupidity

It's worth noting that Hanlon’s razor was not originally intended to be interpreted as a philosophical aphorism in the same way as Occam’s:

> The term ‘Hanlon’s Razor’ and its accompanying phrase originally came from an individual named Robert. J. Hanlon from Scranton, Pennsylvania as a submission for a book of jokes and aphorisms, published in 1980 by Arthur Bloch.

https://thedecisionlab.com/reference-guide/philosophy/hanlon...

Hopefully we can collectively begin to put this notion to rest.

>>skybri+V5
The people in [2] got an email too. (It just turned out to be an automated one that hadn't been intended.)

>>dmvdou+k5
Yeah, but keep in mind he's been in the public eye now for 10-15 years (he started his first company in 2005, joined YC in '11, and became president in '14). If you're sufficiently high profile AND do it for long enough AND get brazen enough about it, it starts to stick, but the bar for that is really high (and by nature that only occurs after you've achieved massive success).