That seems contrary to my experience. Large, powerful bureaucracies are often highly incompetent in ways that clearly work against their own interests. If it were merely a choice they wouldn't choose to be incompetent in those ways.
I guess you could go even more nuanced and say sometimes incompetence from a position of power is a choice, and I would agree with that, but now the statement seems so watered down as to be almost meaningless.
I feel like this is getting far too abstract to the point that you’re actively losing sight of a very real, very concrete and very specific set of actions they took which don’t appear to have any credible and innocent motives but also happen to perfectly align with why by all reasonable definitions would be considered malicious.
Large companies in the US, especially at the current moment in history, have huge amounts of power vested in individual executives.
If those executives valued not being incompetent in any specific given way (especially in the ways that harm the many), they have the power to change that. They can say "no, we need to make sure this never happens again."
The fact that they choose not to do that, in so, so many cases, has a variety of causes, but in the end what it fundamentally boils down to is that they choose not to do it.
The point is not to come up with a simple rule that is going to give you the correct answer in every case but to come up with a simple rule that is going to give you the best outcome overall. You need to think about it in game theory terms:
For friends they are unlikely going to be randomly malicious while assuming malice for every mistake is quickly going to ruin your friendship. So Hanlon's razor makes sense.
Corporations on the other hand cannot be assumed to have morals or care about you. You are already fungible to them so assuming malice until proven otherwise is not going to make things worse for you. Meanwhile giving corporations the benefit of the doubt allows the truly malicious ones to take advantage of that who, unlike your friends, don't really have any other feedback loops that keep them honest.
We were talking about people, not bureaucracies. You've already argued "they were just following orders" on behalf of those who implement. Do you mean now also to excuse those who originate? Or do you really think anyone is going to believe, in 2025, that there is nowhere the buck stops?
That seems contrary to my experience. Large, powerful bureaucracies are often highly incompetent in ways that clearly work against their own interests. If it were merely a choice they wouldn't choose to be incompetent in those ways.
I guess you could go even more nuanced and say sometimes incompetence from a position of power is a choice, and I would agree with that, but now the statement seems so watered down as to be almost meaningless.
I feel like this is getting far too abstract to the point that you’re actively losing sight of a very real, very concrete and very specific set of actions they took which don’t appear to have any credible and innocent motives but also happen to perfectly align with why by all reasonable definitions would be considered malicious.
Large companies in the US, especially at the current moment in history, have huge amounts of power vested in individual executives.
If those executives valued not being incompetent in any specific given way (especially in the ways that harm the many), they have the power to change that. They can say "no, we need to make sure this never happens again."
The fact that they choose not to do that, in so, so many cases, has a variety of causes, but in the end what it fundamentally boils down to is that they choose not to do it.
The point is not to come up with a simple rule that is going to give you the correct answer in every case but to come up with a simple rule that is going to give you the best outcome overall. You need to think about it in game theory terms:
For friends they are unlikely going to be randomly malicious while assuming malice for every mistake is quickly going to ruin your friendship. So Hanlon's razor makes sense.
Corporations on the other hand cannot be assumed to have morals or care about you. You are already fungible to them so assuming malice until proven otherwise is not going to make things worse for you. Meanwhile giving corporations the benefit of the doubt allows the truly malicious ones to take advantage of that who, unlike your friends, don't really have any other feedback loops that keep them honest.
"clearly work against their own interests"
Perhaps, but perhaps there is a bigger set of constraints not visible to an outsider which the "buerocrats" are trying to satisfy.
It is also a question about whose interests we are talking about. Interests of individual decision makers can be contrary to the company as a whole.
We were talking about people, not bureaucracies. You've already argued "they were just following orders" on behalf of those who implement. Do you mean now also to excuse those who originate? Or do you really think anyone is going to believe, in 2025, that there is nowhere the buck stops?