Thursday, November 27, 2014

Malice, Competence, and Conspiracy

Leff's Fourth Law says: 95% of apparent maliciousness is actually incompetence. Napoleon, it turns out, said it earlier and better: "Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence."And Jon Stewart accounts for the Iranian interrogators in the real-life events depicted by his film, Rosewater, thus: "Evil is relatively rare. Ignorance is epidemic"

This shows the problem with conspiracy theories. They're always built on the assumption of both seamless malice and seamless competence, whereas both those things are relatively rare.

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2 comments:

AY AM called Eddie said...

Ascribing incompetence to bad behaviour is also an assumption. It just conforms to your normalcy bias, so you don't have a problem with it. The conspiracy theorists see patterns of behaviour that suggest malice. If there is a pattern of malicious behaviour, wouldn't we want to know about it? If we always assume the behaviour is really incompetence, we'll never see the behaviour for what it is and much harm could be done as a result of our refusal to accept that there is evil in the world. The rejection of any and all scenarios that may involve conspiracy is an odd thing. History is rife with conspiracy. Courtrooms convict people of criminal conspiracy as a matter of course, yet many people act as though conspiracies never happen. This is, of course, irrational. There could be many reasons for irrational denial of the existence of conspiracies. It's difficult to accept that there are evil people in the world as we tend to project our own morality onto others. Denying the existence of a malicious plan to do wrong absolves us of having to do anything about it. Also, the conspirators can capitalize on people's her mentality and reluctance to come to terms with the existence of evil in the world to avoid being discovered and brought to justice. Deriding others for entertaining the possibility of conspiracy is not a sign of intelligence but rather fear.

December 27, 2021 at 2:13 PM
Jim Leff said...

You need a third bucket. I am neither intelligent nor afraid.

December 27, 2021 at 2:14 PM

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