Hanlon’s Razor: Relax, Not Everything Is Out to Get You

This is why it is so important to control the biases and lenses we bring to our interactions. When you hear or see something, which interpretation do you jump to? What is your default interpretation of someone else’s intentions?

Someone once said, “Not all conservatives are stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives.” If you cannot place yourself in a state of mind where this statement, true or false, seems completely irrelevant as a critique of conservatism, you are not ready to think rationally about politics.

As Einstein said, everything should be made “as simple and as few as possible.”36 This principle is known as Occam’s razor. The name, I admit, is unfortunate. It sounds like a cheap late-night horror flick, but it’s actually a mental model named after William of Ockham, a fourteenth-century philosopher. The model is often stated as a rule: The simp