The "malice" part of the razor is bait. People typically act out of self-interest, not malice. That's why anyone who parrots Hanlon's Razor has already lost; they fell for the false dichotomy between malice and incompetence, when self-interest isn't even offered as an explanation.

That's why scapegoating and demonizing people is so bad, it's a way of telling folks that violence can make the world better instead of worse.

What is rare? How is this measured?

Why do incentives result in perceived malicious actions rather than just malicious actions or minor malicious actions?

On top of this no one has said corporations are filled with evil people.

> Corporations are not filled with evil people, but people make perfectly rational, normal decisions based on their incentives that result in the emergent phenomenon of perceived malicious actions.

This rationalization is cope. All US Corporations making "normal" decisions all the time isn't casually obvious. I would say that wherever there is an opportunity to exploit the customer, they usually do at different levels of sophistication. This may mistakenly seem like fair play to someone who thinks a good UI is a good trade for allocated advertisement space, when it's literally social engineering.

Corporations make decisions that more frequently benefit them at the cost of some customer resource. Pair that with decisions rarely being rolled back (without financial incentive), you get a least-fair optimization over time. This is not normal by any stretch, as people expect a somewhat fair value proposition. Corporations aren't geared for that.

Agreed that actual malice is relatively rare (at least, relative to incompetence!). But I feel your take on Hitler is questionable. The question of evil is a tricky one, but I don't think there's a good case to be made that he was only trying to do the right thing. He was completely insane. But leaving aside moral culpability or metaphysical notions of judgment, for any definition of "malice", he embodied it to an the absolute maximum degree.

> That's because actual malice IS rare. Corporations are not filled with evil people,

Corporations don't have to be filled with evil people for malice to be rampant. All it takes is for one person in a position of power or influence who is highly motivated to screw over other human beings to create a whole lot of malice. We can all think of examples of public officials or powerful individuals who have made it their business to spread misery to countless others. Give them a few like-minded deputies and the havoc they wreak can be incalculable.

As for Hitler, if we can't even agree that orchestrating and facilitating the death of millions of innocent people is malicious, then malice has no meaning.

C. S. Lewis has written a great many excellent things, but his quote there strikes me as self-satisfied sophistry. Ask people being carpet bombed or blockade and starved if they're grateful that at least their adversary isn't trying to help them.

Ferret7446:

> Even Hitler's actions can be traced through a perfectly understandable, although not morally condone-able, chain of events. I truly believe that he did not want to just kill people and commit evil, he truly wanted to better Germany and the human race, but on his journey he drove right off the road, so to speak.

Disgusting take. Don't simp for hitler. How am I having to type this in 2025?