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Hanlon's Razor is just a heuristic. What is the reasoning for following it? Or do we just blindly follow an age-old adage because it sounds philosophical?

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For my part, I'm going off of my life experiences.

In the vast majority of cases, the logic behind Hanlon's Razor held. Many times I assumed malicious intent and was proved wrong. As I've gotten older, I've assumed malicious intent less frequently.

I would assume that you fell on the "assume malicious intent too much" side of what's probably a normal distribution, while some other people are on the other side. If that theory is correct, people like you would benefit from Hanlon's razor, but other people would not, they should do the opposite.

I think "people that don't assume enough malicious intent" are a real thing, so I think Hanlon's razor is not an universally good recommandation.

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