alt Hacker NewsI enjoy your thinking! Reflecting further...
Hanlons razor is about motive and "size of mental models". Stupidly small, or comprehensively large.
This other thing you note seems to be about scale being low or high. Individually fine-grained, or collectively coarse-grained.
I suspect mistaking either dimension can result in grossly misinterpreting a situation.
The lowest, most fine-grained level of individual self-interest looks a lot collective stupidity and failure to meet the collective's interests.
Democracy supposely recalibrates from these mismatches. But so do more drastic and unruly options, when democracy has failed.
Interesting. I had not considered how scale affects these mental model.
Now I wonder if depending on the scale, one model is better suited. Or maybe they both can be modified based on the scale.
Maybe self-interest is easier to reason about than the interests of a group. Conflicting self-interests can lead to compromises that result in what looks stupid in the end.