This week I’d like to talk about a star-crossed newsletter launch. Specifically, my star-crossed newsletter launch.
Last Wednesday, I announced Range Widely on the new Bulletin platform with this introductory post. Prior to launching RW, I had been writing a newsletter I called the Range Report; for weeks, I had been mentioning to subscribers that the newsletter would soon move, and that I would transfer their subscriptions, but that they could opt out.
Shortly after Range Widely went live on Bulletin, I enthusiastically transferred the subscriptions. Subscribers who were transferred received an email notice and opt-out option from my new newsletter. They also received a notice that they had subscribed to this guy:
Thousands of Range Widely subscribers got this...whoops
As a very loyal subscriber (with two email addresses!) to my own newsletter (gotta keep numbers up), I was immediately confused by what I had wrought — no offense to this other fellow, who I’m sure is a Ryantastic guy. Then the messages started.
I would say the tenor of messages I received ranged from curious, to querulous, to I’m a hippo and you got between me and my water source. I received a few messages — just a few, but they’re important — suggesting that I had either sold subscriber information or subscribed people to something without their consent.
I immediately jumped on the phone with a member of the Bulletin team to find out what I had done. Reader, until you have tried, you will never know how hard it is to have a stern emergency conversation with tech support while maintaining a straight face and repeating the name/word Ryantastic. A dozen “Ryantastics” later, I learned what happened.
If you can’t wait, you can skip below to the “What Actually Happened” section. But before I tell you, I’d like to do my Range Widely thing and use this as a teachable moment to discuss a critical thinking principle. Namely: “Hanlon’s razor.”
The most common (if not the most polite) formulation of Hanlon’s razor is: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” The term “razor” means that the principle helps you “shave off” unnecessary explanations.
(You may be familiar with the more popular “Occam’s razor,” the idea that the simplest explanation is often the correct one. The most implausible part of Contact is that Matthew McConaughey’s character is a philosopher who hasn’t heard of Occam’s razor. What are you doing all day man?!)
The idea of Hanlon’s razor is that we more often make better judgments if we search for common, reasonable explanations of behavior we don’t like, instead of assuming the worst right away. I like this idea; I think Hanlon’s Twitter might be a nice place. I especially like this idea right now, because I’d prefer you treat Ryantastic-gate as a screw-up instead of a nefarious plot. But this wouldn’t be my newsletter if I didn’t try to investigate whether Hanlon’s razor actually is a good principle for thinking. So let’s begin.
Intuitively, I think it is a good principle. I spent a decade as an investigative reporter, generally assuming the worst motivations behind whatever I was investigating; sometimes that bore out, but often I was surprised to find that some organizational screw-up or other was a result of carelessness or poor communication. I found the same for journalism itself. Early in my journalism career, I was a fact-checker, and I usually concluded that writers who reported inaccurate facts were simply making mistakes, or were blind to their own biases, not proactively conspiring to distort the truth.
As the book Super Thinking notes, Hanlon’s razor is an attempt to correct what psychologists refer to as “fundamental attribution error.” That is, we all tend to judge the behavior of others as if it represents something fundamental about them, even though we don’t judge ourselves that way. When you see someone run a red light, it’s because they’re a jerk who doesn’t care about anyone else. When you run a red light, it was an accident, or you were really in a rush, or this intersection sucks anyway.
Hanlon’s razor suggests that you should at least consider the more generous explanations that you would probably apply to yourself in the same situation. Ok, but will it actually help you be right more often?
A philosopher and psychologist actually just took up exactly this question in a brand new paper. Here’s the tl;dr: research finds that people do tend to assume the worst about those they disagree with, and especially when those people are less like them. But just blanket assuming instead that others’ mistakes are “dumb, not evil,” might cause us to be wrong in the other direction. Furthermore, it might leave us prone to exploitation.
Am I writing this newsletter to convince you that I was careless rather than malicious so I can lull you into complacency and execute more Ryantastic capers?? The paper authors even suggest a dark side companion to Hanlon’s razor that I might be practicing on you right now: “Never admit to malice when stupidity will suffice.”
They then ask whether Hanlon’s razor is a good principle even if it makes you wrong a lot, because it fosters a more civil, collaborative world where people can work together. Kind of like the opposite of Congress.
So which is it? In the interest of safety, should you heed the sentiment of Voltaire Cousteau and “assume that all unidentified fish are sharks?” Or should you assume that sharks are rare in order to gain the benefits of interacting charitably with a rainbow assortment of fish, even if it means increased risk of a shark bite or Ryantastic subscription?
Unfortunately, there’s no perfect answer. The psychologist and philosopher note that the razor should be considered a scalpel, a specific tool to have and consider as we gain life experience and attempt to become more accurate at discerning stupidity/carelessness from malice. So, now you have that tool.
What Actually Happened
On launch day, I was having trouble importing subscribers to Range Widely from my old newsletter, so I reported the issue to the Bulletin team. The tech team then attempted to reproduce the bug that I reported. They fixed the problem, but accidentally sent a welcome email from a Bulletin test account that does not actually exist. You are not subscribed to Ryantastic; it’s not even a newsletter. It was a mistake made in the process of helping me troubleshoot.
You will not get any more email from Ryantastic, and I hope that this fact will lead you, in this case, to wield Hanlon’s scalpel. I was excited for my newsletter launch, and obviously it went Ryantastically awry.
I tremendously value the fact that my newsletter — unlike my books — has given me a place to think out loud in real time, and quickly get feedback. Once when I chatted with Tony Fadell, (aka the “podfather”), he asked me how I like to test ideas more quickly than long articles or books. I was stumped — and then I started writing newsletter posts.
The vast majority of readers I’ve interacted with have been delightful — smart, interesting, civil and productive in their critiques, and eager to share material I wasn’t familiar with. I will not spam you, and I will not subscribe you to anything you did not willingly sign up for. You will always be able, very easily, to unsubscribe from Range Widely.
Thank you for reading. Until next week….
David
What IS the opposite of Schaudenfreude?
As a teen accomplished in surfing sudden-breaking waves ( before all the machinery and lifesaving tech now eliminating risk) , among a group waiting for the next wave in one of the world's more challenging reefs, during a lull, waves began breaking a quarter mile outside us. Alone among the serious, I burst our laughing in joyous ecstasy, because the moment seemed likely to be compressing into my, and our, last.
There was no TIME for anything other than Joy.
I'm sure that everyone else lives, still, but:
“and I only am escaped to tell thee.”
No swirling vortices out of which Ahab's coffin popped, just a foolish batch of newsletters containing humor as subtle and minor as Novichok. Learned, burned, earned, optimism - Hilarity after interminable drought.
Thank you for this; and should it be mere product of caffeinated brain, still, if plebeian-sourced, wonder.