Feigned Incompetence Manipulation

The cluster discusses how cunning or malicious individuals pretend to be incompetent or stupid to deceive and exploit others, countering ideas like Hanlon's Razor by highlighting manipulation tactics in social and business contexts.

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#6962
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Keywords

FYI wikipedia.org HN manipulate know doing exploit professionals compliance persuade making people trick manipulating trait

Sample Comments

pjscott Apr 1, 2012 View on HN

Ah, so it's a trick to exploit people's unreasoning instincts to your own ends. Cool!

darkpuma Jan 9, 2019 View on HN

You should be aware that many malicious people feign incompetence when caught.

croes Nov 22, 2023 View on HN

Or he is great in manipulating people so it's hard to point at a single proving example

aaronbaugher Aug 21, 2025 View on HN

Smart people can get away with tricks like that.

catalogia May 2, 2020 View on HN

Sufficiently advanced malice often pretends to be stupidity, to deliberately exploit the tendency people have to view the world as you describe.

sillysaurus3 Mar 20, 2014 View on HN

Heh. Cunning people exploit the world. Smart people wind up working for cunning people.

watwut Nov 20, 2018 View on HN

Careful about it through. People who use those trics too apparently easily make impression of untrustworthy manipulator.

IncreasePosts May 24, 2024 View on HN

Making people think you're smarter than you are. That's about it.

not2b Jan 7, 2025 View on HN

More like, they think that deceiving people for profit is genius.

Because people have great skill in exploiting other people as well.