A car swerves into your lane, or your boss replies to a three-hour email with a single letter, and your brain instantly constructs a story of calculated hostility. This episode explores Hanlon's razor, the rule of thumb that says never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity, and explains why we need it. The hosts describe philosophical razors as blades for shaving away unlikely explanations, link the concept to Occam's razor, and trace our default suspicion to hyperactive agency detection, an evolutionary bias that kept ancestors alive when the rustle in the bushes was a predator, plus the ego's need for a motive that matches the scale of its hurt.

The conversation then follows the adage's unlikely origin: a 1980 submission by Robert J. Hanlon to a Murphy's Law joke compilation, its adoption into the hacker Jarg ...