a tale of two razors

Life is full of people. It seems redundantly obvious to state it, but people are the core of this post. Unless you’re living off-grid in some part of the wilderness where no-one knows about you, there’s a pretty good chance what you do will be shaped in part by the behaviour of other people. Certainly if you’re working – in IT or otherwise – you’re going to be regularly dealing with people in some form or another.

And people are complex. Over the course of your career for instance, you’ll work with some people who become close acquaintances, others may become even closer, others will be just people you casually interact with, and yes, some will be people that you don’t particularly care for. That’s life.

Early in my career I worked out there was a simple way to deal with the randomness of clashing behaviours and objectives, and it turns out it’s actually a pretty good rule to use not just at work, but also at life in general. It’s not to say I’m a perfect practitioner of it – but then, that means I fit within the rule as well.

Equanimity. Credit: Bigstock.

There are two key razors that help you plot a course for dealing with other people and the situations they shape. Both are useful in their own right, but it’s the intersection of the two that pretty much guarantee you can always plot a path forward.

The first razor is Occam’s razor. This problem solving razor has been around for at least centuries. It can be expressed in any number of variations, but it essentially boils down to this: the simplest explanation is usually the most likely correct one. Applied properly, Occam’s razor is a fundamental method used for discarding complex theories or explanations for simpler ones. It’s why we moved on from blaming lightning on Perun to more prosaic details about atmospheric regions of different electrical charges bumping into each other (which I will note is my very lay-explanation and not to be wholly trusted).

The second razor focuses more directly on human behaviour, and it’s called Hanlon’s razor. In simple terms, it comes down to the rather fun statement “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” At a personal level, it’s a great way to avoid going down a paranoia rabbit-hole: people generally aren’t out to get you, they’re usually just doing their own thing and if they do something that irritates or inconveniences you, there’s probably a good chance that they’ve just not considered the consequences of their decisions or behaviour. At a broader level, it helps you navigate bureaucracy and red-tape; what may appear to be something explicitly designed to cause harm has probably just been developed with layered levels of stupidity and insufficient inspection.

Both razors, I find, are extremely useful in developing knowledge and also understanding people. But there’s a meta-razor (so to speak) that you should keep in mind at all times, and it looks like this:

When dealing with people or their artefacts in any way, always assume Hanlon’s razor holds true until Occam’s razor tells you otherwise.

The meaning of this is simple: you should always assume that something is done out of stupidity or ignorance rather than malice until the weight of evidence tells you otherwise. This lets you surf the randomness of life and your engagement with people both nearby and from afar, while also giving you the scope to pull back if necessary and note to yourself, “no, this isn’t stupidity any longer”.

You can apply this to politics, to social justice, to family, to friends, and yes, to business as well. It does place an onus on you: to “keep the receipts”, so to speak. To watch and observe, and to be able to intelligently recognise that a potential pattern of behaviour could be interpreted as stupidity, but based on the weight of evidence instead needs to be interpreted as malice. (And it doesn’t affect the analysis at that point whether the malice is through wilful ignorance or just pure wilful behaviour.)

Following these two rules, and understanding they have an intersection point lets you keep calm when you need to, but more importantly, also lets you see when you need to take action for your own safety and the safety of others. In family. In friendships. In politics. In life. And yes, in business, too.

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