Occam's Razor

It’s a standard tool of skeptical thinking: When presented with two hypotheses that explain the data equally well, choose the simpler of the two. In this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe discuss the history, nature and complexities of Occam’s Razor.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of I
Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey, you, welcome to Stuff
to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and
I'm Joe McCormick. Today we're going to discuss a problem
solving principle that many of you have probably heard of

(00:23):
and that we've we've definitely referenced on the show before,
and that is Acom's razor. That's right, it's it's one
of the classics, one of the hits of like the
skeptical tool kit. And uh, I think it's a really
good one to get into because it's something that is
widely known, but in different ways and often, uh, to
whatever extent it actually does have value, it often gets

(00:44):
deployed in ways that do not actually make use of
its value, right, Like like an actual razor blade, it
may be misused from time to time. Now, one specific
place that I know we've talked about it before is
that is in the context of Carl Sagan's recommend as
for the tools of skeptical thinking. Uh, he lays these

(01:04):
out and one of them is Okam's razor. He writes,
Okam's razor, this convenient rule of thumb urges us, when
faced with two hypotheses that explained the data equally well,
to choose the simpler. Okay, now, why did we end
up talking about this today. We were in the studio
the other day, uh, discussing upcoming episodes, and you said
that Seth had mentioned this, our our producer, Seth. Yeah.

(01:26):
I was in here and Seth Nicholas Johnson was working
on a crossword puzzle. Was it the New York Times?
He tells us it was the New York Times, Uh,
And he he asked me how to spell okam is
an Ockham's razor And I took a guess at it,
and I can't I can't remember I was correct. I
was probably wrong, but also probably hit one of the
multiple acceptable spellings for OCAM's razors um. But anyway, we

(01:49):
started talking about it and I was like, oh, yeah,
we could do that as an episode, and so here
we are. I'm very glad we picked this because I
think one of my personal favorite genres of of critical
thinking is is being skeptical about the tools of skepticism.
You know, is sometimes people who identify as skeptics can
can I get a little cocky? You know? They get
a little too sure of themselves about what the reasoning

(02:11):
tools they use, and it's worth putting those tools to
the test, giving them a closer look. Yeah. Absolutely, Now
I have to say that I definitely remember the first
time I encountered the concept of Ockham's Rays, or at
least the first first time I encountered it, and it
on some level stuck with me. And that was when
I view the film adaptation of Carl Sagan's novel Contact.

(02:34):
The movie I can't watch without crying. Oh yeah, well,
why does it make you cry? Oh god, there's part No, No,
it's just it's pointed, like especially the first part where
you know it zooms out from the earth and you're
hearing the radio signals go back in time, and then
and then it shows the young Ellie air Away experimenting
with the Ham radio and her dad's helping her, and

(02:56):
I get so emotional. I don't know, it's yeah, yeah,
it's it's been a very long I haven't seen it
since it initially came out, And in fact, the main
thing I remember from it is this scene in which
Jodie Foster's character Eleanor air Away has having this conversation
with Matthew McConaughey's character. Who how old was Matthew McConaughey
at this point, I don't even know how old he

(03:17):
is now he's just like this ageless demon. But anyway,
he has his character. He's playing his character named Palmer Joss.
And in the scene in question, Foster's character brings up
Acam's raiser in a discussion on the nature of God.
She she says, well, which is ultimately the simpler hypothesis
than an all powerful God exists, or the human beings

(03:39):
made God up in order to feel better about things,
and then this ultimately comes back around. Is kind of
flipped on her later on in the film regarding her
character's encounter with an extraterrestrial intelligence, Right, is it more
likely that she really had the experience she thinks she
had with with all these aliens or that she like
hallucinated something that would give her emotional clothe posure and so, yeah,

(04:01):
I think I was in high school at the time,
so it was It was an interesting concept, especially in
the context of atheism versus you know, faith in a
creator deity. Uh, to to suddenly have this tool from
the chest of skeptical thinking just thrown up on the
table and you and seemingly used by both sides. Well, yeah,
I think this is funny. This is a great example

(04:22):
because it highlights some of the most common features of
Acam's razor as it is actually used, Like it's often
invoked in a kind of fuzzy way, like without an
objective measure. Uh, just kind of invoked to back up
your intuitions about the probability of something. Right. But another
thing is that this example shows how it's not always

(04:43):
easy to find a way to compare the simplicity of
two different propositions, like is the existence of God a
simple hypothesis or a complicated one? That I think that
really depends on kind of how you feel about it, Like,
like what kind of objective measure can you come up
with to a vow evaluate that question? Right, It's going
to depend so much on your like your background, your culture,

(05:04):
what you grew up with than just like how you
how you've come to view the possibility of of of
God's existence. Is it just kind of the bedrock of
your your worldview or is it this thing from the
outside that you are contemplating? And also how do you
view it, Like the coherence of the idea. Do you
view it as something that's like, uh, that's full of

(05:25):
all these little kind of ad hoc accommodations, or something
that is a holistic, coherent sort of like fact about nature.
You know, it's I think this is a perfect example
that shows like when people use the idea of Acam's
razor in a way that is not helpful and doesn't
really doesn't really get you any closer to figuring out

(05:45):
what's true. Now, if you're one, If if you're still
questioning like what the concept really means, don't worry. We
will get to some I think some some very understandable
examples of how it can be used properly and used improperly.
But let's go ahead and to start about the concept
itself the word acum uh and you know where this

(06:07):
comes from. We'll get to the origins of Akam's razor. So,
Acam's razor is also known as the principle of parsimony,
and parsimony means a tendency toward cheapness or frugality. So
I like that. It's like the principle of parsimony is
like you want to be cheap with your with your logic, right, Yeah,
I don't need more than two steps of logic between

(06:28):
me and the solution. Uh, you know, don't give me
one with four or five. Uh. And it was named
after the medieval English philosopher William of Ockham, of course,
William of Ockum. Uh so he he lived in the
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, from twelve eighty five to either
thirteen forty seven or thirteen forty nine. I've seen different
death dates given for him. I've seen different birthdates as well,

(06:50):
twelve eighty seven or twelve eighty eight. What I was
looking at. That's interesting. So he was a prolific scholar,
Franciscan friar. We'll get more into his ideas in a minute.
You know, one thing I've always wondered is where the
heck is ACoM. I've never heard of that. Well, yeah,
because the words sound it has kind of like a
remoteness to it. It sounds alien in some ways. Akom
is very much a real place. It is a rural

(07:12):
village in Surrey, England. You can look it up online.
You can find out the website for the church in Ockham,
for example. And this area has been occupied since ancient times.
It's about a day's ride southwest of London, and it
was the birthplace of the individual who had come to
be known as William of Ockham. Now beyond that, beyond

(07:32):
the fact that he was born here, we don't know
a lot about William's life. Uh, we don't know what
his social or family background was, or if his native
language was French or Middle English. As Paul Vincent Spade
explains in The Cambridge Companion to Ockum, he was likely
given over to the Franciscan Order as a young boy

(07:53):
before the age of fourteen, and here Latin would have
quickly become his language of of of not only writing,
it also just conversation. Gray Friar's convent in London was
likely his home convent, but later he traveled. He visited Avignon,
he visited Italy, and he lived the last two decades
of his life in Germany. Now, philosophically, William was a nominalist,

(08:18):
and Spade writes that the two main themes of this
for William were the rejection of universals and ontological reduction.
And these two themes are are not necessarily interconnected. Like
you can you could you could believe in one but
not the other, you know, and vice versa. Um. But basically,
let's let's get into what these means. So the first,

(08:40):
the rejection of universals is perhaps best considered and and
this is very brief and broad certainly you can find
so much written and said on this topic. But basically,
think of it as a rejection of the Platonic idea
of the realm of forms. So that idea that all
chairs that we might make, the wom I design and
call are of an a symbol, are an attempt to

(09:01):
create the perfect chair, which doesn't reside in our world,
but only resides within this realm of forms. So all
chairs that we create are like an aspiration for the
ideal chair. Another way I've thought about it, at least
as I understood it, was that nominalism is kind of
the idea that there is no such thing as a chair.
There's only this chair and that chair, and this chair

(09:22):
over here. There is no chair right like this is.
This is the kind of the situation. One gets it
too when you you get into like the genre classifications
of say albums, artists, or movies that you care a
great deal about, and someone tries to limit it to
a classification and say, oh, well that's classic rock or
that's alternative rock. And you're like no, no, no, no, no,

(09:43):
you don't. Don't try and fit that. There is there is.
These categories do not apply. There is. There is only
you know, whatever your band of choice happens to be. That,
there is only tool, there is only primus or whatever.
Right there, Yeah, there there is only things, not categories.
Now let's move on to the second theme here, ontological reduction.
This is, as Britannica defines it, quote, the metaphysical doctrine

(10:06):
that entities of a certain kind are, in reality collections
or combinations of entities of simpler or more basic kind.
I think your classic example here is molecules atoms. Yeah.
So another example, here's while our Aristotle defined ten categories
of objects that might be apprehended by a human mind,

(10:28):
and these would have been uh translations, vary on on
on how you wanted define these. But substance, quantity, quality,
relative place, time, attitude, condition, action, and affection. William cut
these down to two. Substance and quality. He's really getting
in there. That's the razor. That's what a razor does.
It just it slices away, it cuts off the fat

(10:49):
and gets down to the meat. Spade writes, quote. Although
these two strands of Acam's thinking are independent, they are
nevertheless often viewed as joint effects of a more fundamental cern,
the principle of parsimony, known as Akam's razor. Okay, so
we're getting to the razor here. So William devoted a
lot of energy to arguing against what Spade calls the

(11:11):
bloated ontological inventories of his contemporaries, and he became well
known to his peers for this as such. Either towards
the end of his life or shortly after his death,
a kind of greatest hits album came out on his
thoughts and ideas, titled on the Principles of Theology. Now

(11:32):
it wasn't actually by William of Ockham, but it featured
his doctrine as well as verbatim quotes. There was no
ascribed author either, so later generations would often just attribute
it to him um as well as the notion of
Acam's razor. Uh. However, this specific phrase was apparently never
actually used by him. He never said, Ackam in the house,

(11:55):
I'm going to get the razor out and start carving
on some uh, some some some some ideas here. No,
this is something that is attributed by others to his work. Yeah,
Okam's razor is a is a name for this principle
that is supposed to be kind of a summation of
several different thoughts he articulated in different ways. Yes, yeah,
he summed it up in different different manners in Spain.

(12:18):
Includes includes a few examples of this in his work.
For instance, here's here's some quotes from Akam. Beings are
not to be multiplied beyond necessity or plurality is not
to be posited without necessity, or what can happen through
fewer principles happens in vain through more and there are
other There are other examples of this as well. We're

(12:39):
basically saying the same thing, but maybe like it just
comes off a little flower, at least in translations. Yeah,
I think the the simple version you could get to
the summarizing some of his abuse here, like, uh, don't
make assumptions you don't have to, don't pile on explanations
that are not necessary. Yeah, and also just don't take

(13:00):
more steps that are necessary to get from point A
to point B in your reasoning. And in your hypothesis.
And the way this usually gets translated into modern thinking,
as we've talked about before, is that when you've got
competing explanations, it's better to tend towards the simpler one,
the one that makes fewer assumptions, rather than the more
complicated one that makes more assumptions. Now here's another fun

(13:22):
fact about William of Ackom. William Ackom is key to
Elmberto Echo's excellent novel The Name of the Rose Yep.
This was a novel that was published in nineteen eighty.
Many of you may be familiar with the certainly the
the film adaptation that started Sean Connery, f Murray, Abraham Um,
Christian Slater in a host of wonderful character actors. And

(13:43):
then there was there's a more recent mini series adaptation
with John Taturo that I have not seen, but I
should probably see at some point or another. But anyway,
the main character in Echoes novel is William of Baskerville,
who is in many ways similar. He's a Franciscan friar.
He's got a kind of empirical streak. Yeah, he's basically

(14:04):
a mash up of William of Ockham and Sherlock Holmes.
Thus the Baskerville alluding to uh Hound of the Baskerville's
and the title itself. The Name of the Rose has
has been interpreted as being a reference to Acom's uh nominalism.
There is no one rose. There is only the Name
of the Rose. But there are also other, I think

(14:25):
interpretations on it, and it's meant to be kind of cryptic.
Now according to I was reading more about this, and
it's been been a little while since I've read In
the Name of the Rose. You've read it more recently
than yes, because we were misremembering. We were thinking, now,
was it was the Was it the case in the
book that William of Ockham was supposed to be this
fictional main character's mentor. I somehow had that in my
mind as well. No, Instead it was another medieval scholastic thinker.

(14:48):
It was Roger Bacon. Yes, so so yes, Roger Bacon
was William of Baskerville's mentor, as opposed to William of Acham,
who I do not believe as Ackam is actually mentioned
in the novel. So I was reading a little bit
more about this. There was a two thousand eighteen article
that came out in Philosophy now by Carol Nicholson, titled

(15:09):
Acom's Rose, and she pointed out that Echo had apparently
explored the possibility of simply using ACoM as his main
character in in this novel, but he ultimately quote did
not find him a very attractive person. And therefore, I mean,
did that makes sense right? If you're it's like, you
can either lean on a historical figure, or he can
do something a little more fun and do a mash

(15:32):
up of Acum and the great Detective And ultimately, I
mean that's one of the fun things about the novel
is that is that you do have these elements where
it's a it's Sherlock Holmes going up against bores, you know,
that kind of sort of thing. She writes, Uh, this
is interesting as well, just to draw the parallel between
William of Baskerville and William of of of ACoM, She writes, Quote.

(15:53):
In thirty seven, the year in which the name of
the Rose is set, ACoM faced fifty six charges of
harris and was excommunicated after escaping the protection of Emperor
Louis of Bavaria. This put an end to his academic career,
and he spent the rest of his life as a
political activists, advocating freedom of speech, the separation of church
and state, and arguing against the infallibility of the pope.

(16:15):
She also points out that Acham, like the fictional William
of Baskerville, likely died of the plague. Alright, on that note,
we're going to take a quick break, but when we
come back, we will continue our discussion of Okam's razor.
Thank alright, we're back, all right. So we've been talking
about this principle known as Akam's razor that we've described

(16:37):
already as the idea that simpler hypotheses are better than
more complex hypotheses. There are a number of ways you
can formulate it, but it's a principle that's been referred
back to actually since probably before William of Acam. It
it is, i think, a principle that somewhat predates him
in intellectual history, right right. He did not he did
not create something that was not already um utilized by

(16:59):
other thing ancres of the day and thinkers before him.
One great example of somebody not before William Avacham but
later articulating similar ideas is Isaac Newton, in his great
work The Principia Mathematica from seven, Newton writes, quote, we
are to admit no more causes of natural things than
such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances.

(17:23):
Uh So a similar ideas, there's no need to add
extra explanations when you already have an explanation that is
number one true and number two explains everything you see.
So an example of this might be why do the
planets orbit the Sun? This would be something that Newton
would be concerned with. Newton would say, okay, we know

(17:43):
of two forces that explain what we see, gravity and inertia.
Inertia is the tendency of an object in motion to
stay in motion. Gravity is the mutually attracting force between
two objects with mass. So, because of inertia, the planets
flying through space want to keep traveling in a straight
line at a constant speed. And because of gravity, instead

(18:05):
of traveling in a straight line, their path bends around
towards the Sun as they travel. And so that those
two things are both true and they explain everything we observe,
not now actually not quite everything, but they were good
enough for Newton's time explaining everything. You might also say, though,
that maybe in addition to gravity and inertia, there are

(18:25):
angels that guide the planets in their orbits because those
elliptical pathways are pleasing to the Lord. But if somebody
proposes that you're you're kind of stuck because there's no
way to prove the angel hypothesis wrong. You can't say
there aren't invisible angels guiding the planets. But pretty much
everybody today, I think, even people who believe in angels

(18:46):
in some sense, would not see any reason to believe
that there are angels doing that because there are other
explanations which do all the explaining that needs to be done. Right. Yeah,
I mean once you drag angels into it too, it
it opens up the or for just a never ending
list of reasons why the angels can't be detected or
why the you know, well, why the angel wanted, why

(19:07):
the planet seems to be behaving this way. It's in
accordance with these known laws rather than the machinations of
a divine being right, and you don't need to appeal
in any way to the additional plausibility of angels or not.
Like the reason I said that even people who otherwise
believe in angels don't say that they're guiding the motions
of the planets is you don't need them to explain that.

(19:30):
You've just got basic laws of physics that explain what
the planets are doing. There's no reason to add an
angel's explanation. It doesn't do anymore work. Yeah, it doesn't
even help angels out right, No, I mean, yeah, it's there.
There's just no point in it now. Of course, sticking
on the theory of like the motions of the planets
for a minute, of course, we would have to later
come up with a more refined theory of gravity for

(19:50):
those rare cases where Newton's theory of gravity would fail,
and we would get that with Einstein and general relativity,
which recharacterized gravity is the curvature of space time caused
by deformation due to mass, rather than as a mutually
attractive force between objects. Though in most cases if you
think of it as a force in in the Newtonian sense,
your predictions work out just fine. But from an article

(20:12):
that I want to refer to later by a philosopher
named Elliott sober Uh, he writes, quote Albert Einstein spoke
for many when he said quote, it can scarcely be
denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to
make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few
as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of

(20:33):
a single datum of experience, which in a way is
again articulating something like Ockham's razor. It's saying like, you
want the simplest possible explanation that explains everything. And if
we're sticking with Einstein for a minute, to go beyond
positing something like angels, if if you want to go
into real scientific hypotheses in history, there are all kinds

(20:54):
of things that you might argue we're sort of done
away with by an Occam's razor issue kind of process.
Though I think there are some historians and philosophers of
science that might disagree there. But one example that comes
to my mind is the luminiferous ether. You know, it
was once believed by many scientists that there had to
be a medium in space through which light propagates, right,

(21:16):
the same way that if you want sound to propagate,
there's no sound in space, right, You've got to have
sound traveling through a medium like air, or like water,
or like a you know, like a steel wire. There
must be matter to transmit that energy, and so the
idea was that space was filled with this stuff, this ether,
that light waves propagated through. And eventually, due to Einstein

(21:39):
and to other thinkers and experiments it it started to
become clear that the ether was superfluous. You didn't need
it to explain any of the properties of light. Now,
there's another example from history that often comes up when
people talk about Okam's razor. It's often brought up as
a great example of Akam's razor being applied. But we're
gonna get to an article later on that I think

(22:01):
has presents a pretty devastating case against this being true.
But just to set it up here, it is the
idea of comparing the Ptolemaic universe versus the Copernican universe, which,
obviously this argument was brought to a very dramatic end
UH in the life of Galileo, Right Galileo got into
big trouble with the Inquisition for, among other things, they

(22:22):
were also politics involved, but for among other things, advocating
the Copernican model over the Ptolemaic model. UH. For simplicity's sake,
the Copernican model of the Solar system was of course,
the one we know to be more basically correct, not
totally correct, but more correct because it was helio centric.
It put the Sun at the center of the Solar
system and argued that the other planets, including the Earth,

(22:44):
all rotated around the Sun. Uh. This, of course was
not the orthodox astronomy of the day. The more favored
models were the traditional Totolemaic model, which had the Earth
at the center and the the planets all going around
the Earth, and these strange kind of spirograph patterns that
had these things called epicycles where they would sort of
stop and then do a circle and another circle, and

(23:06):
like loops within their their traveling um And then you
had some compromise models like the model of Tycho Brahy. Now,
the traditional argument here in favor of saying, you know,
Copernicus and Galileo were on the side of Acam's razor,
it would go something like, well, the Ttolemaic system and
the and the Tycho Brahy models, they've got all this

(23:26):
extra stuff. You need to assume, all these weird extra assumptions,
like like epicycles, you know, like where the planets are
going around in loops, and it's not explained exactly why
they're doing that. You just have to insert the loops
in order to make it match our x are our observations,
and therefore the Tlemaic model was more complex. We'll come
back to that later on, because I think now it's

(23:49):
going to be important to get into some criticisms of
acams razor. You know, if you go into especially a
lot of like kind of skeptic communities on the Internet,
you might sometimes people treating Occam's razor as if it
is some kind of law of nature, like referring to
Ockham's razor in the same way you might refer to
proven theories about reality, such as, you know, the equations

(24:13):
describing the action of gravity or something. Uh. And so
I think while Ockham's razor is an interesting and sometimes
useful skeptical lens to apply, it is not in fact
a law of nature. And then there are a couple
of major branches of criticisms of ye old razor. I
think the first would be like accusations that it is
often misunderstood or misused, And then second there would be

(24:36):
actual attacks on the usefulness of the razor even when
it is in its supposedly true form. Now, the first
thing would be pretty simple, and it's just the idea
that Ockham's razor is misunderstood, misquoted, misconstrued, misused. Uh. I
actually I came across a funny blog post that, of
all things, pointed to a quote from a mystery writer
named Harlan Coben. Uh my writers, yeah, uh yeah, I'm

(25:00):
not familiar with this writer, but I thought this was interesting.
This would you know? It was just an example of
somebody saying, no, you're not using Ockham's razor. Right, This
writer wrote quote, most people oversimplify Okham's razor to mean
the simplest answer is usually correct, but the real meaning
what the Franciscan Friar William Ovakan really wanted to emphasize
is that you shouldn't complicate, that you shouldn't stack a theory.

(25:23):
If a simpler explanation was at the ready, pare it down,
prune the excess. And so I think looking at it
this way, this fits more with like the the version
that we were talking about with Isaac Newton. Right, it's
not necessarily a statement about simplicity as a general principle,
but saying that you shouldn't stack things that explain the

(25:43):
same outcomes on top of each other, because you get
no extra usefulness out of that. Another example that I
was just thinking of that's come up on the show
before is the idea of aquatic ape theory. Oh. Yes,
this is the idea that, among other things, humans are
hairless because for a while, our our ancestors lived at

(26:05):
least partially in the water. Yeah. The ideas you look
at a lot of our body features are relatively smooth skin,
bipedalis um, layers of subcutaneous fat, uh, the abilities of
our vocal cords, all kinds of things like that. The
proponents of aquatic ape theory say, hey, we've got all
these strange anatomical morphological features that are not the same

(26:26):
as other great apes. Why do we have those qualities?
I think you could explain them all if humans once
needed to be in the water, so they needed to
be smooth. You have smooth skin in order to be
aerodynamic swimmers, and they became bipedal so that they could
wade around in the water. And you come up with
a list of explanations along these lines that they would
argue all point to an aquatic ancestry. But there's a

(26:48):
wrinkle there because of course, if that's all true, the
question is, then why did we retain all those features
after leaving the water? You know, humans are not an
aquatic species now, I mean, we can go into the water,
but water is not our primary environmental niche so what
you know, how can we still have all those features?
And the the aquatic ape theorists might say, oh, well,

(27:10):
once you came onto the land, it actually was useful
to be bipedal for these other reasons, and which is
useful to be hairless for these other reasons, which then
means you could cut out that entire step of having
to be in the water to stick with these are
useful for living on the land exactly. You might apply
Akham here and say, if those features turn out to
be useful on land, why wouldn't they just evolve on
land in the first place? Right, So there is like

(27:32):
you've you've you've end up then creating or redirecting to
the hypothesis that is one enormous step shorter. Yeah, And
so aquatic ape theory, I think is one of those
things that like it would be hard to completely disprove.
I think that there is no physical evidence pointing toward it.
It would be hard to say this is impossible to

(27:53):
have happened, but there's just no reason to assume it.
It just it just like adds in an extra step
of explanations that don't explain anything any better than other
explanations could. Yeah. I mean, it's kind of like if
I come home from work and I have, say, beer
and bread. Uh, maybe I stopped at two places to
get the beer in the bread. I got the beer

(28:14):
in one place and the bread of the other, But
I also probably just stopped at one store to get
both of them. Both are likely one is a shorter trip.
I feel like you would also have to add in
something it kind of extravagant. That would be like you
stopped at the way home and you entered a raffle
contest in which you one beer and bread. Uh, And
then you also may have stopped at the store, you know,

(28:35):
to get something else, but like right, yeah, where I
stole beer and bread? As like when the simple explanation
is probably probably just bought beer and bread, or beer
and bread was was placed in my car by a
mysterious stranger. Like these are all things that are possible
and could conceivably be the reason that I have beer
and bread in the car, but Acam's razor slices away

(28:57):
the unnecessary steps, the less likely step for the shorter
trip between point and point B. Right. And I think
in cases like that, you could say that docums raiser
doesn't necessarily prove a theory wrong, but it is kind
of a useful heuristic. It might help you, uh use
your intellectual time wisely. Right. Uh. But and and that

(29:18):
gets us to the next step, which is the more
comprehensive criticism, the idea that acum is maybe in fact
wrong or not useful. I think in some cases this
criticism is true, so maybe we should get into it
a bit. The first article I wanted to look at
is called The Tyranny of Simple Explanations, and it was
published in the Atlantic. It was written by the science

(29:39):
writer Philip Ball, one of my favorite current science writers,
who wrote the book Beyond Weird, a really fantastic book
about quantum physics that I recommended last summer. This is
one of your summer reading picks. I think, yeah, it's
really good. It's one of those books that you may
think you already you know, you've already read a quantum
physics book. You know, you know the basics, you know,
you know the the what the interpretations are, and all

(29:59):
that I've like, this is one you can still be
newly amazed by and learn a lot more from right
and true form. As a great science writer, Ball I
think makes a fantastic case in this article against Stockholm's razor,
against you know, a liberal use of it. So he
starts by saying, quote, Okham's razor is often stated as
an injunction not to make more assumptions than you absolutely need.

(30:23):
And in that way, it's almost a truism, right, I mean,
like when when you phrase it that way, who would say, well, yeah, no,
I want to make more assumptions than I need. Yeah,
I mean you can come back to like a forensic example, right,
detective work which even Carl Sagan makes a discusses this
a lot like comparing science to uh to the work

(30:45):
of a detective, Like how many hypotheses do you need
for a murder? Right? And you know there's gonna You're
gonna be the obvious ones that you know, especially the
Ockham's razor, are going to be the primary candidates that
it was someone the victim knew that it was, like
a spouse or a friend, etcetera. Uh, rather than inventing

(31:05):
wild scenarios with no evidence to base them on, right, saying,
you know, certainly getting into possible scenarios like maybe it
was the random work of a serial murder. Serial murders exist,
this does happen from time to time, but is it
the most likely scenario? And then that's not even getting
into wilder possibilities like well, perhaps it was a an
assassin a spy whom mistook them for another person. Well

(31:28):
that's possible too, but again, more far more steps that
are necessary, the the the shorter trip is the more likely, right,
And in terms of not making more assumptions than you need,
ball rights that. This is of course good advice. If
you're trying to come up with a good explanation for something,
you add nothing by writing in a bunch of extra
complications that don't help the explanation explain anything more than

(31:51):
it did when it was simpler they should. Explanations should
be as simple as they can be without losing power
to explain and predict. Quote. That's why most scientific theories
are intentional simplifications. They ignore some effects, not because they
don't happen, but because they're thought to have a negligible
effect on the outcome. Applied this way, simplicity is a

(32:12):
practical virtue, allowing a clearer view of what's most important
in a phenomenon. So again he's saying there that Okam's razor,
it's it's not necessarily that Ockham's razor tells you what's true,
but Okam's razor makes theories useful. Because then he goes
on to argue that Okham's razor is quote fetishized and

(32:32):
misapplied as a guiding beacon for scientific inquiry. So he thinks, what,
you know, what we're just saying simplicity is a virtue
of theories and explanations because they make theories clearer, easier
to use. But it's dangerous to jump from that to
the assumption that simplicity is actually a measure of truth. Quote. Here,
the the implication is that the simplest theory isn't just

(32:54):
more convenient, but gets closer to how nature really works.
In other words, it's more probably the correct. One Ball
says this is wrong is simplicity does not actually tell
you anything about which theories are right and which ones
are wrong. He argues, there's really no reason to believe
that simpler theories better describe nature than complicated ones, and

(33:16):
he gives a few examples. He talks about Francis Crick
warning against trying to apply Okham's razor as a critical
tool for theories in biology because biology gets really messy,
and he cites examples where it kind of led us astray.
Like he he cites Alfred kempis eighteen seventy nine proof
of the four color theorem and mathematics, which was kind

(33:37):
of favored for a while because the proof was considered
very simple and very elegant, but it turned out to
be wrong, you know, very roughly. Here it makes me
think of something we talked about before in the show
about how how evolution is often kind of a miser
it's often cheap, uh, And so part of that, you
could you could apply the simplicity model to that and say, Okay,

(34:00):
it's that means it tends to take the shortest route,
it tends to to perhaps engage in simplicity, but at
the same time, uh, it's kind of lazy, and lazy
can create these sort of messes where and yea, yeah,
we're saying, like some biological structure has evolved, you know,
for one thing, but it ends up getting partially abandoned

(34:20):
and then reused for something else. And it can get
it can get messy, it can get complicated. A million
years of shortcuts can turn into a quite circuitous route. Yeah,
and so Ball rights that in his view, he has
not found a single case in the history of science
where Akham's razor was actually used to settle a debate
between rival theories. So I just want to make sure

(34:43):
that his distinction is coming through. He is saying. It's
useful for trying to make theories easier to talk about,
easier to understand, easier to apply, But when it comes
between competing theories trying to say which one is more true,
which one makes better predictions, he is not found a
single case where Okam's razor was the decisive factor. And

(35:05):
what's worse, he says a lot of people have tried
to retroactively apply Ockham's razor to historical scientific debates where
it was not in fact too decisive in reality. Uh,
And he cites as an example a debate we've already discussed,
the geocentric versus the heliocentric solar system and I thought
his take on this was really interesting because I I
had been taken in. I think I had previously thought, well,

(35:26):
maybe a really good case of Ockham's razor is heliocentrism
winning over geocentrism, because with geocentrism you just had to
make all these weird assumptions about the movements of planet.
You had to do extra work to make it fit right,
That's what I thought. But he actually digs into the
debate of the time. Ball points out that in reality,
so you know, we talked about one of the big

(35:47):
things being all these epicycles that in the Ptolemaic model,
with the the geocentric view, the planets go around the Earth,
but they don't just go around. They make all these
weird loops and stuff called epicycles. You had to build
that in in order to explain what astronomers saw in
the night sky, the planets appearing to regress. They'd go
back and forth and stuff. Um. So, so he says,

(36:08):
we've got all these epicycles. But Ball points out that
in reality, the Copernican model that was being argued about
in Galileo's day, that heliocentric model was also full of epicycles.
And this was because Copernicus was not aware of what
Johannes Kepler would later discover about the orbits of planetary
bodies being elliptical rather than circular. So because he lacked

(36:30):
that crucial assumption that that important part of the theory,
Copernicus also had to build weird little loops into his
heliocentric model of the Solar system. He got the heliocentrism right,
but he thought the planets were moving in perfect circles
that didn't match observations either, So like Ptolemy, he cheated.
He put all these loops in there to make the

(36:51):
model work out right, and it wasn't until heliocentrism was
combined with Kepler and elliptical orbits that the epicycles were
finally banished. And based on this, Ball argues that there
was really no way at the time to suggest that
the Copernican system was simpler. In fact, he points out
that Copernicus invokes a number of weird, non scientific assumptions

(37:12):
in support of his model. For example, quote uh in
his main work on the heliocentric theory, De Revolutionibus, I'm
gonna have trouble with this one. De Revolutionibus orb um celestium.
Uh He argued that it was proper for the sun
to sit at the center quote, as if resting on
a kingly throne, governing the stars like a wise ruler.

(37:35):
That doesn't sound like a very scientific criterion. No, I mean,
maybe he's kind of breaking it down for people, you know.
I mean, of course he did turn out to be right,
But like that, that seems like an unjustified assumption based
on what he knew at the time. Uh Ball also
points out that by the time Kepler comes around, we're
no longer in a situation of competing theories trying to

(37:57):
explain the same observations, because Kepler had access to better observations. Quote.
The point here is that as a tool for distinguishing
between rival theories, Occam's razor is only relevant if the
two theories predict identical results, but one is simpler than
the other, which is to say, it makes fewer assumptions.

(38:18):
This is a situation rarely, if ever, encountered in science.
Much more often theories are distinguished not by making fewer assumptions,
but different ones. It's then not obvious how to weigh
them up. I think this is a fantastic point right.
I think to come back to the aquatic ape theory
like that, that is one of these rare situations. I

(38:38):
think that it seems to match up, right, it's making
additional assumptions, and it's like, oh, yeah, we would have
to keep those traits later anyway, we need explanations for that.
It just seems like it's making more assumptions. But that's
almost never how it goes. Usually the assumption is just
different assumptions, and then how do you know which assumption
is simpler than the other one? Right, And the the

(38:59):
whole aquatic eight section of the of presumed evolutionary advancement
is kind of its own epicycle, Yeah, exactly removed because
there's an epicycle in this theory but not in this
one exactly. Yes. I mean, if you're trying to look
at like not additional assumptions in the theory, but just
different assumptions in the theory. Even cases where to us

(39:21):
it might seem obvious one way or another, which one
seems simpler, it's not always obvious to people at the time. Uh.
He He brings up the question of Darwinian evolution is
descent from a common ancestor more or less complicated than
the idea of a divine created order common descent. I
think that would seem like a less complicated theory to

(39:42):
many of us today, But would it have seemed simpler
to the world view of people who were debating common
descent in like the mid late nineteenth century. Who you know,
you've already got a theistic worldview that's basically a built
in assumption, right right, Yeah, yeah, A lot of this
does come down again coming to what we spoke about earlier.
Regard the basic religious argument. Like if you're coming from

(40:02):
a really religious background where you've had this um this,
you know, the the idea the reality of a God
hammered into you, and then you're presented with with with
the atheist argument, you know, you may say, well know
that that is that requires farm There had so many
epicycles in your your your your atheism, where my my

(40:24):
faith is just clear and straightforward as a whistle. I mean,
people did actually argue that way. They'd say, look at
all this weird stuff you have to assume about the
history of life, and all I believe is there's a
divine created order. I mean, that's it's like a bumper
sticker thing like Uh, what God, God wrote it. I
believe it in the story three Steps that theory, Yeah,

(40:44):
it is. Simplicity is often in the eye of the beholder,
like you don't have h I mean, there are some
people who would argue there are cases where you can
try to mathematically quantify uh, complications or assumptions or simplicity,
But in general that's really hard to do. You don't
have an objective measure that you can apply from the outside.
A lot of times it's just going to be kind

(41:05):
of fuzzy qualitative judgments. What what seems like less of
an assumption to you. You lack an objective measure, people
go with their intuitions. Uh. And this does not seem
like a good recipe for sorting between theories. So coming
back again to two balse formulation of of Acam's Razer,
It's basically like, if you have two theories that are

(41:25):
competing to explain the same things, they make all the
same predictions and explain it equally well. Yeah, they explain
they make the same predictions, explain things equally well, but
one of them has more assumptions. You go with one
with fewer assumptions. But Ball argues that you almost never
in reality, get cases where the predictions of two theories

(41:46):
are exactly the same. Instead quote, scientific models that differ
in their assumptions typically make slightly different predictions too. It
is these predictions, not the criteria of simplicity, that are
of the greatest use for evaluating rival theories. Again, I
think this is a good point. I mean, theories almost
never predict the exact same thing, so why not just

(42:09):
judge them on how good their predictions are? Uh. Finally,
he writes that he can only think of one real
instance in UH, in science where there are rival theories
that make exactly the same predictions on the basis of quote,
easily numerable and comparable assumptions. And this one example he
can think of is the different interpretations of quantum mechanics,

(42:32):
which I think is a fantastic example, and that did
not come to my mind. But I think he's exactly
right about this. So we've discussed interpretations of quantum mechanics
on the show before. We're not going to go deep
on that, but just for a very short refresher. Basically,
we know that the mathematical fundamentals of quantum theory are correct.
They make extremely good predictions, like, we know the theories right,

(42:54):
but there's a problem. They predict a world of probabilities,
not of certainties. So if you have a theory that
predicts an electron will be fifty percent in one state
and fifty percent in an opposite state, but we only
ever observe physical reality embodying one state at a time,
how do you resolve that it just does not match

(43:14):
our experience of reality. So that's where the interpretations of
quantum mechanics come in. That they're trying to reconcile this difference,
explaining why the indeterministic, probabilistic quantum world somehow resolves into
the solid deterministic world that we experience every day. And
there are tons of interpretations. You've got like the classic
Copenhagen interpretation, which predicts that objects exist in a kind

(43:38):
of a state of superposition until something interacts with them
and collapses. The way of function makes them assume one
state or the other. You've got the now popular mini
worlds interpretation, originating with the physicist you ever at the
third in the late nineteen fifties. This suggests that reality
is constantly splitting into infinite alternate timelines based on the

(44:00):
different possible outcomes of unresolved quantum states, and and we
only observe one outcome because we are also splitting, and
the current version of us is only one of many
uses that experiences one world at a time. And then
you've got a bunch of other theories to basically, these
interpretations make exactly the same physical predictions. No matter which

(44:20):
one of them is correct, the outcomes of our experiments
will be exactly the same, so there's no way to
test which one is right. Though, And in a funny turn,
Ball points out that Okam's razor has been invoked both
for and against the many worlds interpretation, again coming back
to the fact that a lot of times this just
comes down to people's intuitive judgments, Like he quotes the

(44:41):
quantum theorist role in Omnus quote, as far as economy
of thought is concerned, there never was anything in the
history of thought so bluntly contrary to Ockham's rule than
Everett's many worlds. On the other hand, you've got a
modern physicist like Sean Carroll of of Caltech who advocates
the many worlds in repretation, specifically because he argues it's

(45:03):
the simplest interpretation of quantum theory. He says. It doesn't
make any additional assumptions. It's the simplest way you can
map the theory onto reality. The weird thing about about
this too is that I feel like, at this point,
if you consume enough science fiction, and not even just
science fiction but general just popular culture, the many worlds
interpretation has been used, at least casually so often, then

(45:27):
in a way it feels slightly more plausible, just because
just due to familiarity, which I realized is not a
scientific argue, Like you could not you could not reasonably say, well,
I leaned towards many worlds interpretation because that's how The
X Men works, my favorite TV show uses it. It's
got but on some like level, it's still kind of
gets into you, it still affects you. I agree. I

(45:49):
mean again, I think this is this is pointing out
some of the weaknesses in how Walcom's razor is often applied.
It's like people think they're applying some kind of objective
criterion when really they're just kind of going with their
gut about like what what feels more plausible? Uh, and
and that's something Ball kind of hammers home at the
end when he writes, quote, but this is all just
special pleading. Acam's razor was never meant for pairing nature

(46:13):
down to some beautiful, parsimonious core of truth. Because science
is so difficult and messy. The allure of a philosophical
tool for clearing a path or pruning the thickets is
obvious in the readiness to find spurious applications of Akham's
razors in the history of science, or to enlist, dismiss,
or reshape the razor at will to shore up their preferences.

(46:35):
Scientists reveal their seduction by this vision, but they should
resist it. The value of keeping assumptions to a minimum
is cognitive, not ontological. It helps you think a theory
is not better if it is simpler, but it might
well be more useful, and that counts for much more. Yeah,
that's well put. It helps us think, rather than help

(46:57):
us explain the world. Right, there's no way to show that. Well. Actually,
so we're about to get into somebody who says that
there may be cases where you can show simpler theories
are objectively more true. But but Ball argues that at
least most of the time in science and real competing
theories in the history of science. It's not that simpler
theories are more true or explain reality better. They're just

(47:20):
easier to get your head around and test. All right,
on that note, we're going to take one more break,
but we will be right back with further discussion of
the razor. Thank alright, we're back. All right. There's one
more article about Akham's razor that I found really interesting,
very useful, and it is called why is Simpler Better?

(47:41):
This was published in Eon by Elliott Sober, who is
a professor of philosophy at the University of Wisconsin Madison,
and he's published a lot on the philosophy of science,
specifically as it applies to biology and natural selection, and
he wrote a book on the subject of Ockham's razor.
Uh So, he starts off, I think this is kind
of mentor talking about simplicity and complexity and art. Could

(48:03):
you possibly have a norm that one is always better
than the other? I mean that seems kind of strange, right, Like,
we love simple art and we love complex art, and
it would be strange to find a person who just
wants one or the other. Yeah, I mean this makes
me think of of movie posters. I don't know, you
probably remember it seems like it was a few years back.

(48:25):
The big craze for a while was that the designers
would come up with a super simplistic movie poster for
classic film or a you know, a fan favorite film.
And it was really fun for a while. And uh
and but then it kind of overstates its welcome, you know,
and and and it just became kind of, at least
to me anyway, kind of kind of irritating to even

(48:47):
look at. You're like, no, I don't I don't want
to see like this film reduced to this ultra simplistic symbol.
I know exactly what you're talking about. And I think
there was a counter reaction because then you started to
see a lot of graphic design for redoing old movies
with new posters in the kind of return of the
Jedi stuff where there's a bunch of stuff, there's like
a bunch of people on the poster and things happening, yeah,

(49:08):
or that it's just kind of like a geometric explosion
of things, you know. Uh So, yeah, you saw the
pendulum swing both ways. But in general, yeah, I feel
like it's that way in art. I mean, I think
we can all point to specific examples in our own
life where here's something we like that is very very
tight and neat and minimalists. Maybe it's even like a
musical argument. Yeah, I love like minimalist ambient recordings, but

(49:32):
I'm also the type of person who enjoys uh cacophonist
recordings and complex recordings, and likewise with visual arts, likewise
with you know, film, TV and other mediums you you
like hugely layered like mixed tracks and stuff. Yeah. Yeah,
but then I also like, uh, you know, I love
I don't, I don't. I don't know that it gets

(49:53):
kind of complicated, right, because even something that is very
minimalist can be of course very complicated and layered. Uh.
But but yeah, I think everybody is gonna everybody's taste
pendulum is going to swing both ways there. But that's
the world of art though, right, I mean, so that's
one thing, that's the world of human creation. Um, and
sometimes those creations are are made, uh to mimic nature,

(50:16):
but they are not necessarily nature itself, right, Yes, And
I think you can apply something similar to science. So
some of what Sober is going to write in this
article mirrors what we were just talking about with ball
like he He starts off by saying, Okay, it's clear
that simpler theories have some qualities that are good. They're
easier to understand, they're easier to remember, they're easier to test. Uh,

(50:38):
And of course in just an aesthetic sense, they can
be more beautiful. But he says that the real problem
comes in when you're trying to figure out how good
is a theory for telling you what's true? You know,
how well does it predict things that you will encounter
in the world. Some pasta scientific thinkers have tried to
come up with reasons why. Yeah, it's like, simplicity is

(50:59):
actually better, it actually predicts predicts the world better. And
a lot of these justifications were theological in nature. Uh.
Like for example, in Newton, in talking about why he
prefers simpler theories wrote quote to choose those constructions which,
without straining, reduced things to the greatest simplicity. Uh. The
reason of this is that truth is ever to be

(51:20):
found in simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion
of things. It is the perfection of God's works that
they are all done with the greatest simplicity. He is
the God of order and not of confusion. And therefore,
as they that would understand the frame of the world
must endeavor to reduce their knowledge to all possible simplicity.
So it must be in seeking to understand these visions.

(51:42):
So again, I mean, I would say that's fine to
believe that. That's not a scientific reason for believing things
that simpler things are more likely to be true. Right,
he had to fall back on the idea that we
have a lawful, good God as opposed to a chaotic
good God. Right, I mean, it would only be a
bad God that would allow more complex explanations to be correct.
And Sober actually says there are some cases today, uh,

(52:05):
that can help us know when a model is objectively
more accurate, like modern statistical methods. There are some ways
that you can reduce theories to mathematical advantage, at least roughly,
and that in these cases there there are times where
you can show simpler is actually better. Uh. He argues,
there are three paradigms in which Occam's razor holds true,

(52:27):
and so the first one is that sometimes simpler theories
actually have higher probabilities. He invokes the medical adage here,
don't chase zebras. This is this comes from the idea
of you know, when you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras.
I've also heard that as unicorns. As another analogy, if
you hear footsteps coming down the hall, you can have

(52:49):
a couple of different hypotheses. It's a human walking down
the hall, or it's a RoboCop walking down the hall.
Which one is going to be correct more often? Well,
it's going to be a human. It could conceivably be
somebody in a RoboCup cost him, but the chances of
that are pretty slim. I mean, unless you like, are
in a RoboCop factory or something, It's going to be

(53:10):
a human way more often. And the same goes in
diagnosing diseases. If you observe a set of symptoms in
patient history that are equally likely to predict a common
disease and a rare disease, pick the common one, You're
going to be correct much more often than if you
always pick the rare one. Right. Um. You know this
also brings me back to the serial killer example. You know,

(53:31):
like what what is more more likely though, that it's
someone the individual knew, or it is a random killing
by a serial murder. You know, unless there is a
serial murder active in the area, which raises that that
the chances for that to be true, but by a
considerable margin. Uh, it's going to remain a zebra. Now
a unicorn, but a zebra exactly, unless you have independent

(53:52):
evidence pointing to that as a superior hypothesis. There's no
reason to go to a rare phenomenon that would explain
things equally l Yeah, so I know, it seems like
there are enough podcasts about serial murders. It might seem
like there are more of them out there than there are. Well,
there you get into some cognitive biases. Yeah, the availability
heuristic kicks in. But of course another question is like,

(54:14):
how often does a thorough review actually put you in
the situation where two things explain what you see equally well,
like truly equally well. One's rare and one's common. But
but so Sober says that you've got this concept he
calls the razor of silence, and and the basic explanation
of this is that if you've got evidence that A

(54:35):
is the cause of something and no evidence that B
is the cause of something, then A alone is statistically
a better explanation than A and B together. This goes
back to the stacking of explanations that we were talking
about earlier. Like, if you've got an explanation that already
explains everything, there is no justification for adding additional explanations

(54:57):
on top of it. But you don't need to add
the angels pushing the planets. Well, let's come back to
the murder scenario. How do we apply this forensically? Uh? Well,
as so we're actually I think says something kind of
like this, but like, if you have clear evidence of
one cause of death on somebody, you don't need to
assume extra causes of death stacking on top of it

(55:18):
without direct evidence of them as well. So if you find,
like a you know, a body, I don't know, a
body at the bottom of a cliff and they're dead,
you can assume that it was falling off the cliff
that killed them. You don't need to also assume that
they were poisoned or something. Unless you know, you do
blood talks and then it comes back with poison you
can't assume it then. But there's no reason to start

(55:39):
stacking on additional assumptions. Now there's another way that sober says,
sometimes Occam's razer actually does hold true. It it's sometimes
simpler explanations are better, and it's simply that sometimes simpler
theories are better supported by observations. Uh. He gives this
great example. Suppose all the lights on your street go out.

(55:59):
You could have to competing hypotheses. First, one something happened
at the power plant, and that influenced what happened to
all the lights in the neighborhood, or maybe there's a
down power line something like that. The other one, something
happened to all of the light bulbs at the same time. Now,
these would both explain the observations, right, like either either

(56:22):
all of the light bulbs suddenly went out on their own, independently,
just coincidentally, all at the same time, or there's something
happened with the power supply to the whole neighborhood. Sober argues,
based on the work of the philosopher Hans Reichenbach, that
in this case you can actually show mathematically that the
evidence for the first for the power plant hypothesis is stronger,

(56:43):
just based on the fact that it's simpler. Uh. And
a similar example in real science look at common descent
in biology. So based on the evidence of massive amounts
of genetic code shared by all living things. Today, people
usually say, okay, that that's evidence of common descent. We
all share a common ancestor we all inherit some common

(57:04):
genetic code. Now you could also say, well, maybe all
living things on Earth have different ancestors and they just
happened by coincidence to have overlapping strings of genetic code.
That would require a lot of strange coincidences. So the
evidence actually favors common descent, just like it favors a
power outage over hundreds of simultaneous lightbulb failures. So a

(57:26):
serial killer example of this might be, oh, man, what's
happening in the dark corners of your brain today? Rob?
I don't know. I just keep coming back to it,
I guess. But okay, so one parton, So if like people,
they're all these dead people and they all have say
a death head, moth um, what was a caterpillar? Oh yes, yes,
yes yes? Or was it a cocoon? I can't recall

(57:47):
off hand and from silence of the lamps. Yeah, they've
got like a moth cocoon in their mouth or something.
So perhaps they just happened to each individually wind up
with one in their mouth, like somebody accidentally eight one
one in a salad bar, and the one was like
looking up and it fell out of a tree, because
one had escaped from a private collection, was living in
a tree. You can have sort of independent explanations for

(58:08):
why each of these occurred, or the other possibility is
somebody's killing them and putting them in their throats. Right,
the one common explanation actually explains observations better than assuming
a whole bunch of strange coincidences. And then we got
the third paradigm Sober gets into, which is that he says,
sometimes the simplicity of a model is relevant to estimating
its predictive accuracy. So what a good theories do well?

(58:30):
They make accurate predictions about things we don't know yet.
They either accurately predict future measurements or outcomes or discoveries.
Does ocams Raiser have anything to say here? Sober says, yes,
sometimes simplicity effects our best guesses about how accurate a
new theory will be, and he cites the work of
a Japanese statistician named Hiratugu Akayiki who did important work

(58:52):
in a field called model selection theory. This means how
to judge the strength of a new model or theory
before it has had time to be tested in the field,
and a model evaluation system called the Akayiki information criterion
says that you can predict how good a new model
or theory will be by two measures, how well it
fits old or existing data. Obviously, better fits are better,

(59:15):
and then how simple it is. Simpler models are better. Uh.
Simplicity is evaluated by quote the number of adjustable parameters,
and having fewer is better. Now. Sober gives an analysis
of why this is the case using an example of
trying to estimate the height of plants in a corn
field based on previous random samplings of the fields. I'm
not going to get down into all the details of this,

(59:37):
but if you want a deeper understanding of this one,
I'd recommend looking up the article that. The short version
is that in some situations, depending on a number of
assumptions about what types of models and data you're dealing with,
simplicity of a model is actually a good predictor of
how well future data will conform to that model. And
it's just a fact about statistics. The sorcery of average

(59:57):
is not a fact about individual cases is on the ground. Now.
He concludes by saying that these three paradigms have something
in common and quote whether a given problem fits into
any of them depends on empirical assumptions about the problem.
Those assumptions might be true of some problems but false
of others. Although parsimony is demonstrably relevant informing judgments about

(01:00:21):
what the world is like, there is, in the end,
no unconditional and presupposition less justification for Ockham's razor. Uh So,
so that's tough, right, Like Ockham's razor is not a
tool you can apply to every situation to get closer
to the truth. It's a tool that is useful sometimes
for some types of judgment. And the real difficulty is

(01:00:43):
recognizing when you're in one of those situations in which
it's useful or one of those situations where it's actually
just a logical red herring. So really it kind of
comes back to, uh, you know, we we were talking
about Sagan at the beginning of this and how he
said this is one of the tools in your Eptics
tool chest, and the thing about a tool chest is
that you have more than one tool in there. And

(01:01:05):
the screwdriver cannot be used for everything, right, I mean,
you can try. It's useful for a lot of things,
uh and certainly very useful for screws. But there's gonna
be a time when you're gonna have to pull out
another tool to deal with the problem. And there are
gonna be plenty of cases you will encounter We're trying
to use the skeptical tool of Akham's razor is like
trying to clean out your electrical socket with the screwdriver.

(01:01:27):
You're just it's gonna steer you astray. And I'm very
sorry that in the end here we don't have like
a clean rule to just guide you like this is
when you can use it, this is when you can't.
I think it comes down to, I mean, Sober has
some useful things to say. They're about like types of
situations where it is helpful, but yeah, they're there. There's
I'm sorry, there's not just like an easy rule of

(01:01:48):
thumb for when the when the razor will be helpful. Yeah.
I mean, ultimately, it is a tool that was not
plucked out of the sky, but it was plucked out
of human reasoning and uh and and human problem solving.
By the way, coming back to the Name of the Rose,
I want to point out that there is apparently a
highly regarded Spanish eight bit computer game based on the

(01:02:12):
name of the Road. Yeah, it's a It's titled The
Abbey of the Crime, which was actually uh and they
conceived it as an adaptation of the Name of the Rose,
but they were unable to secure permission to do so,
and they in fact, I read that they didn't even
hear back from Echo. They tried to get a touch
of them and they couldn't get hold of it. And
try to imagine the umberto Echo essay about this video game,

(01:02:33):
like when he tries to play it, that would be good. Uh.
But basically the Abbey of the Crime. The title they
went with was apparently like the working title for the
Name of the Rose at one point, um, so they
released it under that name, and instead of having the
main character be William of Baskerville, the main character is
William of Alcolm and uh. And I thought that was

(01:02:55):
pretty much the int to it. You know, you can
look up the footage of the game and all. But
then I just learned for the first time this may
be more common knowledge for everyone else out there. Um,
there is a remake of it, like they did, like
a revamped version of it with improved but nicely pixelated graphics.
Uh the Abbey of the Crime Extensive, which you can

(01:03:16):
get on Steam. Apparently I don't really do Steam, so
I don't really know how it works, but um, yeah,
it's listed on there. Came out in and it looks
really cool like the for instance, now the the updated
sprites the little characters in the game, they look so
much like the actors in the original film adaptation to
the Name of the Rose, Like it's a little Sean

(01:03:36):
Connery and Christians later. Yeah, I don't know if they
got permission to use their likenesses. Um, how close does
it have to be in eight bits? I don't know.
That's that's a great question. But but my other question
is just I would like to ask listeners out there,
if you've played this, please let me know how it is.
I'm very curious, not that I think I will actually
play it for myself, but I just I'm genuinely genuinely

(01:03:59):
interested in, uh, in what a video game adaptation to
the Name of the Rose is like. If you know
the solution at the end of the book, can you
automatically beat the game immediately, like yeah, or are there
different solutions? I don't know, Uh, you know, is it
a different murder each time? That would be crazy. Arrives
at the abbey, speaks to the abbot immediately says, I
got something to lay on you. Is Occam's razor a

(01:04:22):
an item that you can pick up like a plus
one Ocom's razor that can then be employed in combat.
It's like the Master Sword. Yeah, surely there is not
combat in this game. I should hope not. I should
hope it's just a lot of talking. Um. Yeah, I
cast the poverty of Christ on you. Well. In the

(01:04:43):
screenshot I was looking at does look like, um, the
main character Baskerville slash Atom does have a pair of spectacles,
but then there's like one to three they're there are
multiple empty spots here. So I guess he gets other stuff.
I mean, I guess various books and whatnot, some of
them and juice. Uh, probably some cheese, some cheese or

(01:05:03):
that gets like some fried cheese at some point, yeah,
I think so, but mostly books, mostly books. All right?
So there you have at alcams Raiser. Hopefully we're able
to to lay it out for you um, you know,
an explanation of what what Alcom's razor is, where it
came from, uh, some of the various opinions on its usefulness.
You know it's so you can take the tool, put

(01:05:25):
it back into the tool chest, and know a little
a little bit more about it the next time you
pull it out and go to use it. In the meantime,
if you want to check out other episodes of Stuff
to Blow Your Mind, go to stuff to Blow your
Mind dot com. That'll shoot you over to the I
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(01:05:46):
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These are the things that help us out huge thanks
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(01:06:13):
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