June 19, 2026 • 40 mins
You know the rule that says the simplest explanation is probably the correct one? That’s called a razor and it’s meant to guide logic. But over time it’s become a broadsword used to disprove opposing arguments. Learn how to spot a faux skeptic in this episode.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
It's Josh coming back at you hot with our twenty
eighteen joint on Ockham's razor, one of the more semi
understood scientific principles, but it's also probably the most widely
used of them, all too or misused. I guess I
should say we have a medieval monk who became one
of the early proto scientists to thank for Ockham's razor,
(00:22):
which makes him a hero to science. And here's our
episode on that hero. Welcome to Stuff you Should Know
from HowStuffWorks dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
(00:42):
I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and
there's guest producer Tristan over there. So it's stuff you
should Know.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
I don't know how these are going to release, but
as you've noticed, Tristan weirdly grew out his mustache in
the last hour.
Speaker 3 (00:56):
Again, he's quick, he's very past.
Speaker 1 (01:00):
He can make it go in and out, in and out.
Speaker 3 (01:03):
What is that.
Speaker 1 (01:05):
It's like he's growing his mustache and it's sucking it
back in. Oh, okay, sucking it back in. No, No,
like a reverse Plato. Right, do you remember that Plato
set with the.
Speaker 3 (01:15):
Like a little meat grinder.
Speaker 1 (01:18):
No, there was one where like you could grow a
mustache on it, dude.
Speaker 3 (01:21):
Correctly, I think I remember that.
Speaker 1 (01:23):
Yeah, but imagine if you could reverse it too.
Speaker 3 (01:26):
It was called the Plato Nightmare set.
Speaker 1 (01:30):
Yeah. Is that your nightmare? Growing a Plato mustache? Waking
up like that?
Speaker 2 (01:36):
Yeah, I've had that dream about once a week for
about thirty five years.
Speaker 1 (01:40):
Like all the rest of you is chuck, but just
your mustache is Wallace and Grommet.
Speaker 3 (01:45):
Yeah, dude.
Speaker 2 (01:46):
Yesterday, I uh, there was a bad smell. Emily and
I were having a glass of wine at a wine bar.
There was a bad smell nearby. I think it was
a dumpster or something, and they were growing fresh herbs
at the wine bar, and I rubbed a rosemary bush
and then swiped it all over my mustache. And Emily's
(02:10):
mind was blown. She was just like, oh my god,
Like I can't believe, Like that's an actual use for
facial hair.
Speaker 1 (02:19):
Yeah, I guess it just to.
Speaker 2 (02:20):
Hold in that smell. It was like, well, you can
wipe it on your upper lip. It's probably the same thing. Sure,
maybe the hair retains more.
Speaker 1 (02:28):
Essential oils. I don't know, maybe which essential oils. Man,
people are clamoring for that episode.
Speaker 3 (02:34):
Yeah, we should do that.
Speaker 1 (02:35):
We will eventually.
Speaker 3 (02:36):
It's been a big part of my life for ten
and twelve years.
Speaker 1 (02:38):
Now, Essential Oils. We'll talk about it someday, but not today.
Speaker 2 (02:43):
No, no, because Chuck's gonna stumble through a philosophy podcast.
Speaker 1 (02:48):
It's a yeah, I guess it is philosophy. It's the
philosophy of knowledge. Epistemology is another way to put it.
But specifically, Chuck, we're talking today about a little ditty
you may have heard of before called OCAM's razor.
Speaker 3 (03:03):
Called the Gambler?
Speaker 1 (03:04):
Have you? Have you ever you've heard of Okham's razor before?
Speaker 2 (03:08):
Right, Well, so much so that I thought for sure
we had covered this, But I realized that we just
talked about it quite a bit in the Uh Scientific
Method episode.
Speaker 1 (03:17):
I'm not at all surprised because a lot of people
say that the basis of science, which is how humans
approach nature in our universe and us and everything scientifically,
the basis of that is Ocham's razor. And if Okam's
razor sounds familiar but you can't quite place it, you've
probably heard it as something like given two possible outcomes
(03:42):
or explanations or whatever. The simplest version is probably the
right one.
Speaker 2 (03:49):
Yeah, it's a pretty even that in its simplicity is beautiful.
The mere statement itself is an example of its simplicity
and how wonderful can be just to think, like, yeah,
you know what, let's get through all the gobbledygook. I
think the easiest way to explain this. Whether it's a
(04:10):
A H A A what do you call the orb
in a photos?
Speaker 3 (04:16):
Yeah, it's not.
Speaker 2 (04:17):
It's not your great grandfather coming to visit you on
a different plane. It's really just an error with your photographs.
Speaker 1 (04:25):
It's the flash, yeah, reflecting off a like water vapor
in the air.
Speaker 3 (04:32):
Or Kennedy probably acted alone.
Speaker 1 (04:34):
Kennedy he shot himself from Afar.
Speaker 2 (04:39):
Yeah, I clearly meant to say Oswald acted alone, because
that is the simplest explanation, not this very convoluted, deep
plot that goes that one hundred people were involved in
to assassinate Kennedy.
Speaker 1 (04:56):
So we'll talk about all that because it's a teaser.
What you're doing right now is has become pretty standard.
You're using Okham's razor to disprove other people's points.
Speaker 3 (05:06):
Yeah, there's this is.
Speaker 1 (05:08):
A total and complete misuse of Okham's razors not the
original intention. The original intention had nothing to do with
saying that's wrong. It is just a heuristic device, a guide,
a rule of thumb that tells you that, because things
tend to be more simple in the universe, if you
(05:32):
if you're doing something, don't make it harder than it
has to be. Don't add more to it than is
needed to get the job done. And there's actually a
couple of ways to put this, and both of them
get attributed to William of Ockham, who will talk about
in a second.
Speaker 3 (05:46):
Yeah, Billy Ockham.
Speaker 1 (05:47):
But one is called he sounds like a baseball manager.
Speaker 3 (05:50):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (05:51):
But one is called the principle of plurality.
Speaker 3 (05:54):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (05:54):
Harder to say fast than you would think it is,
And that is translated from the Latin plurality should not
be positive without necessity. And the other is the principle
of parsimony, which is it is pointless to do with
more what is done with less. From what I understand,
they are one and the same. Oh really, I could
(06:14):
not find anyone who could explain the difference. And I
see them interchangeably, not just like on some dude's blog,
but I'm like, you know, it's the Internet Encyclopedia philosophy
or the Stanford Encyclopedia philosophy, Like they don't seem to
be different.
Speaker 2 (06:34):
Well, parsimony, it seems different to me because that specifically
is like not using resources, not spending money if you
don't have to. And that seems different than plurality.
Speaker 1 (06:46):
Okay, well then then let's explore it. So plurality adding
to something, doubling something, maybe just making it more than
just the singular. He's saying plurality should not be positive
without necessity. Right, So I guess what he's saying. Then
if they are different, then if you're if you're guessing
at something, if you're trying to explain something, don't make
(07:08):
it harder than it is, don't make it bigger than
is absolutely necessary to explain it.
Speaker 3 (07:13):
Yeah, that makes sense.
Speaker 1 (07:15):
Or and this is a really big point that we'll
see in a minute. William of Occam really was saying,
don't don't add on to something beyond what you know
to be true and correct, which a lot of people
over time, and I think he actually maybe explicitly was
an impirsist have said William of Ockham was an Impisis.
(07:35):
He was saying that you need to experience things through
your senses to know that they are true.
Speaker 2 (07:43):
Yes, empirical evidence if I can look at it or
smell it, or taste it or feel it.
Speaker 3 (07:48):
What's the fifth one?
Speaker 1 (07:50):
Uh, tickle it, tickle it.
Speaker 2 (07:52):
And then the sixth one, of course we know means
Bruce Willis is really dead.
Speaker 1 (07:56):
See the ghost of it.
Speaker 2 (07:59):
Yeah, if there is no empirical evidence, if you cannot
experience it with one of your senses, then.
Speaker 3 (08:05):
It's it's poo pooed.
Speaker 1 (08:07):
So so it is so. And those two things, like
you really especially modern science, especially science these days, you
put them together. It's given two things. Go with the
simpler explanation, and you don't don't believe anything that you
can't sense one way or another through your sensus empirically. Right,
you put those together, you have the basis for modern science.
(08:28):
And so the idea that that that things that are
simpler are better, or the idea that the universe is simpler,
Like when you start to think about it, it's all
over the place, right, Like the the idea that the
universe is based on simpler being better is found everywhere. Right, So,
(08:48):
like there's things that things have fewer parts, things that
require less energy, the encapsulation of larger ideas into smaller
amounts of words or theories or whatever. All these things
are very much prized by humanity. So it just kind
of makes sense that Okham's razor is a sensible thing
(09:10):
and that you could actually use it to uncover the
mysteries of the universe. Yeah, but again, that's not really
necessarily the case, to tell you the truth.
Speaker 2 (09:18):
No, I mean, there's there's gonna be a lot of
uh and and this stuff is kind of fun, just
a lot of back and forth on Occam's razor throughout
this whole thing, because there is no its and that's
kind of part of the whole jam of Ockham's raiser
is there is no right or wrong here, right.
Speaker 3 (09:34):
You know what's weird is that? Right?
Speaker 1 (09:37):
A lot of people point to it though that it's
oh this is right. I just proved you wrong and
that's just not true. Man.
Speaker 3 (09:44):
All right, should we take a break early?
Speaker 1 (09:47):
Okay?
Speaker 3 (09:47):
Yeah, I think we should take a break.
Speaker 2 (09:49):
Now because I need to get my head wrapped around
this and we'll come back getting the way back machine
and visit Billy Ockham.
Speaker 1 (09:55):
Okay, so now Billy Ockham sounds like a nineteen eighties
(10:21):
recording star. Oh sure, like Billy Ocean.
Speaker 2 (10:25):
Yeah, get off of my razor and get into my car.
Speaker 1 (10:30):
Was this so we should say the razor too. It's
a philosophical term, so term of philosophy, the razor used
to scrape away unnecessary stuff. So it's Okham's razor. So
let's go back and meet Billy Ockham, shall we.
Speaker 3 (10:51):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (10:51):
And you wrote this by the way back in your
in your article writing Days, and you point out very Astutelee,
that this is from a time in our history of
the world where you might not have had a surname.
You may have been William of Ocham, which is the
case here, which is in England. And he lived between
about twelve eighty five and thirteen forty nine, and he
(11:15):
was a philosophical dude and a Franciscan monk, and he
very much like you point out, took his valid poverty
very seriously and lived a very meager, humble life.
Speaker 1 (11:28):
Yeah he did. He also expected the church to take
the same vow Potterphy, and he actually butted heads with
the church quite a bit, so much so that he
ended up getting excommunicated, as we'll see, but he was
the real deal as far as like a true believer went.
The weird thing about William of Ocham was that he
was also a genuinely independent theeker and a rationalist, which
(11:54):
at the time rationalism and the church did not go
hand in hand. They were there was really not much rationalism.
So for an idea, the idea for this this upstart
Franciscan monk to start questioning the ideas of the church,
and not only that, but how the leaders of the
church conducted themselves, and how much money they surrounded themselves with,
(12:17):
and how much power they had politically. This is it
was a big deal, right.
Speaker 3 (12:21):
Yeah, And he is not.
Speaker 2 (12:22):
He did not invent this line of thought as much
as he's probably attributed to this to people that just
know him from like a jeopardy board. This is already
a line of thought well established by this time in
the medieval times, and he was just he kind of
boiled it down to those two sentences that you were
talking about so anyone could understand it. He could put
(12:46):
it on a bumper sticker and a T shirt and
sell it, right.
Speaker 1 (12:49):
So it was Aristotle who was the guy who came
up with this idea first, that simplicity equals perfection, and
perfection equals simplicity. Said, the more perfect a nature is,
the fewer means it requires for its operation.
Speaker 3 (13:02):
Right.
Speaker 1 (13:03):
I love that, So that makes sense.
Speaker 3 (13:05):
That speaks to me.
Speaker 1 (13:06):
But then over time, in between Aristotle and William it
kind of got expanded. So let me give you an
example of that same thought from Robert gross Test who
was an early scientist also a theologian I believe too.
Here is his version of it that is better and
more valuable, which requires fewer other circumstances being equal. For
(13:27):
if one thing we're demonstrated from many in another thing
from fewer equally known premises, clearly that is better, which
is from fewer because it makes us know quickly, just
as a universal demonstration is better than particular because it
produces knowledge from fewer premises. That similarly, in natural science,
in moral science, and in metaphysics, the best is that
(13:49):
which needs no premises, and that better that which needs
the fewer other circumstances being equal.
Speaker 3 (13:57):
Boy, the ironies there are rich.
Speaker 1 (13:59):
Right. So within less than one hundred years, William of
Auckham comes along, and he's just like plurality should not
be positive without necessity, Robert.
Speaker 3 (14:08):
Yeah, And Robert was like, well, yeah, I guess that's
one way you could say it.
Speaker 1 (14:12):
So I want to say something though, before we keep going, Chuck,
I actually found a correction of my own article, oh
that I missed before.
Speaker 3 (14:21):
What's that?
Speaker 1 (14:22):
It turns out that they think now that another theologian
slash scientist from William of Ockham's era named John Dunn
scottis was the one who really encapsulated this principle of
plurality and principle of parsimony, and that it was a
guy from the nineteenth century, William Rowan Hamilton, a British mathematician,
(14:45):
that he was the one who misattributed it to William
of Ockham.
Speaker 2 (14:48):
So is William of Aukham just a a know nothing, No, No,
His writings definitely included this stuff, and he never took
credit for this, Okay, But they think think that it
was actually John's done.
Speaker 1 (15:03):
Scott is who who encapsulated it the way that we
tend to think of it now.
Speaker 3 (15:08):
So he's sold the bumper stickers.
Speaker 1 (15:09):
But right, But William Levacam thought this way, and he
was a radical thinker and a rationalist, as we'll.
Speaker 2 (15:15):
See, right, and like you kind of teased out earlier,
he did butt heads with the church over this. He
wrote a lot about it, and the church was not
into it, and Pope John the what is that twenty second?
They kind of squared off on this, and of course
the Pope wins all battles, at least back then, and
(15:37):
he was excommunicated in several of his his monk brothers
and I take that to mean not real brothers, right right,
were excommunicated. In thirteen twenty eight, he went to Munich
seeking refuge. He was protected there by Emperor Louis the fourth,
and ultimately he went out because he started right about
(16:01):
Pope John the twenty second, saying he's a heretic, and
people ultimately believed him.
Speaker 3 (16:06):
Right.
Speaker 1 (16:07):
He definitely made some pretty convincing points. And he also again,
like if you're saying I took a vout poverty, the
church really should too. And the church isn't poverty stricken
and you are. It gives you a little more credibility
from the outside as well. Sure, so there's some reasons
why William of Waucam is this theologian, a devout Franciscan
(16:27):
Monk is looked upon as one of the fathers of
Western science, like the foundation of Western science right, or
science in general. And the reason why is he argued
against the prevailing ideas at the time, which is called
medieval synthesis. And this is very much championed by Thomas Aquinas,
(16:48):
who's a famous theologian. I believe he was a saint
and one of the reasons he was canonized was because
of this. Thinking about this, But the whole medieval synthesis
thing was that God was first and foremost everything. Right,
you were a member of the church just as much
as you were a member of your country, a citizen
(17:09):
of your country. All human knowledge came from God, and
Thomas Aquinas it wasn't just like the end. Thomas Aquinas
used philosophy to prove that sentiment that all human knowledge
came from God, and here is how. And basically it
took the idea of cause and effect and said that
you can trace every effect back to a cause, back
(17:30):
to another effect, back to another cause, but ultimately you
were going to end up on God, and that all
of our conceptions of everything arose from God's conception, and
that God willed that we understand things this way, which
means that this is the perfect way to understand it,
which means it's right right. So that is not what
William Wackam thought. He was again a rationalist who said, no,
(17:53):
we tend to think things are things because that arises
in the human mind from cognition, not from God. And
this dude was not a heretic. He believed that you
didn't apply rationalism to God, that God required faith, sure,
and rationalism stood on its own it was a different thing.
And you couldn't know God through your senses. God was elsewhere.
(18:17):
Leave God out of this. And the fact that he
was able to really successfully lay like a philosophical groundwork
for this, a rational groundwork for it's one thing today
to be like I'm a secular humanist, you know, I'm
rational to forget the church that's today. This is at
a time when this guy is saying this and the
(18:37):
church has the power to burn you at the stake.
Like he was a stand up rational thinker, right, which
kind of makes him a hero of rationality today. But don't.
And this is another perfect example of how Accam's razor
gets confused. Accam himself gets confused too, he's a hero
of science, but it was also one of the more
devout human beings walking the earth at the time. It
(19:00):
was a monk for basically his whole life.
Speaker 3 (19:02):
And also had a metal band called Medieval Synthesis.
Speaker 1 (19:06):
Oh that is a good name, isn't it.
Speaker 3 (19:07):
So he was just a conundrum.
Speaker 1 (19:09):
Yeah, he was a conundrum for sure. And again he
got excommunicated. He had to escape by horse stolen horse. Oh,
I mean he was not very monk like.
Speaker 3 (19:19):
No, But all right, So.
Speaker 2 (19:21):
We were talking earlier about empirical evidence and how that
kind of fits in here, and the fact that if
you can't you know, like, you know the sky is
blue because you look up and you see it's blue.
You know a bird makes a whistle because you can
hear the bird make a whistle.
Speaker 3 (19:37):
So it's very easy to sort of use.
Speaker 2 (19:41):
That and say sure, but if you don't, if you
can't see it or hear it empirically or any of
the senses experience it, it's very easy to poo poo.
And you give a great example here with Lorenz and
Einstein and kind of which one would win out. So
both of these guys, both physicists, Einstein obviously more popular
(20:05):
will see. For a very important reason. They both had
the conclusion mathematically that with the space time continuum, the
closer we get to moving at the speed of light,
the more we slow down, which is hard to wrap
your head around. So Lorenz comes out and says, explains
it away because of changes that take place in the ether,
which he might as well have said, a bit of
(20:26):
magic happens. Einstein didn't, and so the one we talk
about today is Einstein and not Lorenz. That explanation of
Einstein was more rooted in science, and he didn't say
something wacky like the ether, which is something empirically you
can't see or smell or taste. So Einstein, you know,
(20:47):
he won that great battle.
Speaker 1 (20:49):
Yeah, he very famously said, He goes, I don't know
what's what, but I know it ain't got nothing to
do with no ether.
Speaker 2 (21:00):
My brain's gonna end up in a jar in some
guy's garage in New Jersey, right.
Speaker 1 (21:03):
And everybody will love that picture of me with my
tongue sticking.
Speaker 3 (21:07):
Out, and Walter Mattho will play me in a romantic comedy.
Speaker 1 (21:10):
So Laurence violated that principle of plurality. Right. He added
something to this that required an additional basically like a
leap of faith. There was no empirical evidence that there
was such a thing as the ether.
Speaker 3 (21:23):
And he said, did I say ether? And I didn't
mean ether? And never went no, no, no to.
Speaker 1 (21:27):
You, late Laurent.
Speaker 3 (21:28):
Well we heard you, buddy.
Speaker 1 (21:30):
And he's still I mean, he's a respected he's a
respected physicist.
Speaker 3 (21:33):
Still.
Speaker 1 (21:33):
It's not like he was some crackpot or anything like that,
because if you put his equations in Einstein's equations side
by side, they came to the same conclusions. It was
just explaining how Lorenz seems to have misstepped right, right,
But he was obviously at least as brilliant as Einstein.
When it comes to that, he's just a little nuts apparently.
So he violates the principle of plurality. And now we
(21:56):
understand relativity rather than Lorenz's manic raven Yeah.
Speaker 2 (22:00):
And I don't believe we mentioned there's a word for that.
If you can't prove it empirically, it doesn't exist. It's
called positivism. Yes, positivism isn't about having a good.
Speaker 1 (22:09):
Attitude, right, and so this is and this also happened
during Einstein's working days too. There was a guy named
Ernest Mack, and Ernest Mock was so Ernst Mack, thank you. Yeah,
that's that's way better than Ernest. Ernst Mock. He was
so nuts on empiricism. He was a he was an
(22:31):
early I think he was a physicist, if not a mathematician,
one of the two. And he he basically said, like,
molecules don't exist. All this whole bubble over molecules and
atoms and all this stuff, you're all crazy. We can't
see him. They don't exist. So there's a there's this
kind of ironic twist that came from Einstein's working career
(22:51):
where he actually he beat Lorenz, his rival, to this
theory through this through Okham's raiser. But he also disproved
this idea of that Ernest Mock, this thing about only
believing what you can sense with your your senses, this
(23:11):
kind of other part of Okham's razor, in a subsequent
paper that came a few years later that showed that
molecules do exist. So the idea that that OCAM's razor
can be used both ways is something that just keeps
coming up again and again and again. And we'll we'll
talk about how after a break. How about that? Okay, Chuck, So,
(23:56):
who who uses Okham's raiser? Obviously everyone who was throwing
money down on the cockfight between Lorentz and Einstein were
using Okaham's rais? Were they all went with Einstein's because
this was the simplest.
Speaker 3 (24:09):
Right, Yeah?
Speaker 1 (24:10):
Who else uses it?
Speaker 3 (24:12):
Well?
Speaker 2 (24:12):
I mean you have a great section in this article
about skeptics, and I know over the years of the show,
over the past ten years, we've had a lot of
minor scraps with the skeptic community.
Speaker 1 (24:25):
That's a pretty minor Is that fair to say?
Speaker 2 (24:27):
Yeah, because I mean we have our skeptical side for sure,
but they're you know, when it comes to skepticism and skeptics,
it's sort of on a sliding scale. There's a range
of how you might feel about certain things, and you
very astutely, i think, point out that if you are
a true skeptic, then you will not use Akham's raiser
(24:47):
like I did earlier as a tool to disprove something right,
that you will only use it as a tool to
consider different explanations. And that's there's a big difference there.
Speaker 1 (25:00):
There is so like like that whole idea of seeing
a ghost on film. Right, So there there's there's this
example where somebody could say, so you just explained something
about light and refracting and something with the film and
there was moisture in the air. What's Isn't it just
(25:21):
simpler to say, no, that was a ghost exactly. And
in that case, if you were a skeptic, you would
you would you're you pull a little tuft of your
hair out, maybe just start scraping at your cheeks until
you bleed. Uh. Ideally, what you would say is I
get what you're saying, but you're bringing something into this
(25:42):
that we don't know exists. Like we do know light exists,
we do know it refracts off of vapor, we do
know how this can be captured on film. So yes,
that sounds very complicated. But the the ghosts don't exist
as far as we know. We can't send the empirically.
But I would keep my mind open to the idea
(26:02):
that ghosts could consumably exist. The fact that I just
showed that this is reflect the reflection of light off
of water vapor in this graveyard does not mean that
your hypothesis about ghosts existing is wrong. It just means
that's what's in this picture? Right, that's a true skeptic.
Speaker 2 (26:20):
Right, because because things happen and they can later on,
the more fantastical explanation could.
Speaker 3 (26:27):
Be true and has been true. Uh. And you point
out very.
Speaker 2 (26:33):
Very plainly here that there's a couple of problems with this,
and to me, this kind of says it all, is
that it's subjective. Like the whole notion of determining is
this is the most simple explanation is completely subjective because
the ghost explanation, one person might say, no, the ghost
explanation is clearly the simplest because I can just say
(26:54):
one word ghost, see there, and then you could fire
right back. Well know, I can fire back two words
photographic mishap, right, or maybe just mishapp Yeah, if they
want to keep it completely equal, And that's the most simple.
So it's completely subjective as to which one or anything
(27:14):
that it's the most simple.
Speaker 1 (27:16):
Right exactly. And then again the idea that you can
use Acam's razor to disprove something just by showing that
that it's not the simplest explanation, that doesn't that's not correct,
that's not right, And so scientists will use Occam's razor
and all sorts of different disciplines like for example, if
you're making an artificial neural network, right, like a learning machine,
(27:39):
you might use decision trees, and you will use some
sort of simple decision tree over a more complicated one
that can get the same job done. That doesn't mean
that it's necessarily the right one, but there are demonstrably
good reasons for picking a simpler one over. It's less
likely to break, it takes less time, it takes less
(28:00):
energy to come to the computations. There are things that
are valuable about it, but it doesn't mean that the
other one is just wrong. And again, when you're using
Okham's razors, say, if you're making a neural network, or
you're pouring through a data set or something like that,
or you're trying to interpret a big data set, yeah,
you're making again like you're saying, not just a subjective
(28:24):
judgment about what's simpler. But that's all there is to it.
You're making a subjective judgment about what's simpler, not what's right.
It's not saying what's right. And this is a recurring
theme that you just have to know because there's so
many people out there that use Okham's razor to disprove
other people's ideas, and that's just not at all what
(28:47):
it was originally intended for. It's just a complete perversion
of it and it's just wrong, and that's not how
science works. So if you see somebody out there doing this,
thump them in the forehead.
Speaker 2 (28:58):
Yeah and boy, then when you get into the outle
it gets really interesting because this is sort of a
prime example of the simplest explanation from a believer's point
of view, is very easy to say, No, the Big
Bang is incredibly complex and complicated, and it's pretty clear
(29:18):
that the easiest explanation here and the simplest thing is
God created life in seven days, right, But that's also
discounting the process that it took God to create Earth,
if that's what you believe, and just kind of bundle
it up in a tidy package, say God created life.
The Big Bang is super complicated, so and very coincidental
(29:40):
if you really look at it. So this is the
simplest explanation, Okham Trazer proofs that God.
Speaker 1 (29:46):
Exists, right, And so that's been used time and time
again by creationists, right, or people who believe in ghosts
are people who counter empiricism in a lot of ways. Right, Yeah,
But on the other hand, you can you can find
atheists to use OCAM's razor to show that God does
not exist, because their point is if the universe tends
(30:09):
towards simplicity and God is perfect and simplicity is perfection,
then if God existed, the universe would be a lot
more simpler. There wouldn't be this big bang thing that
we have that happen it would You would be right creationists,
and the fact that you're wrong means that means that
there is no God, which is just like, my head's
starting to spin a little bit with this, But it's
(30:31):
a good example of how you can use OCAM's razor.
Both sides can use OCAM's razor to disprove the other
person's point, which against it shows how it's not meant
to be used that way.
Speaker 2 (30:41):
Well yeah, and then you point out too and talk
about a headspinner like something like photosynthesis is a pretty
complex mechanism in nature. But I mean, who's to say
that that isn't the simplest way to achieve food production
in a plant. Maybe that is the simplest.
Speaker 1 (30:58):
Yeah, we have no way of knowing that there is
a simpler model of the universe or photosynthesis or of
a shark or anything like that, and that even something
that does seem superfluous, we can't say that in the
larger scheme of things, that it's actually the simplest way
to do that, right. So like like a shark seems like, man,
(31:21):
maybe do you need that extra fin or something like that,
Or does a cow really need eight stomachs? Or do
we really need two kidneys?
Speaker 3 (31:29):
Right?
Speaker 1 (31:29):
But what this point is saying is that there's we
don't have the information to look at everything on such
a grand scheme of things to say no, there if
humans only had one kidney, this other larger system would
break down, and this is actually the simplest way to
do it, right.
Speaker 3 (31:44):
Or there's a cow with one stomach that we can
compare it to right.
Speaker 1 (31:47):
Right exactly, So this whole thing, this is the point, Chuck,
where I reach this very glaring idea that o COM's
razor or what Aristotle said that simplicity is perfection, that's
all man made, that's human made. Sure, that's a human
(32:08):
made concept. To value simplicity is human made. It is
possible the universe complicated you can come up with all
sorts of examples of the universe being seemingly pretty complicated.
Just the universe itself seems pretty complicated, frankly, right, So
that doesn't necessarily mean that the universe tends towards simplicity.
(32:29):
It seems like humans value simplicity and the universe uses
simplicity a lot, But that doesn't mean that simplicity is
perfection or correctness. That's a human construct.
Speaker 2 (32:41):
Well, yeah, and like let's say, in terms of engineering,
it's probably a decent model to think, hey, the more
complex the system is that I'm engineering, the more things
that are to break. So we should probably try and
make it as simple as possible. That still gets the
job done. But that's not to say that it can
be rudimentary, like you might need it might need to
(33:03):
be a little bit complicated to run at its most.
Speaker 1 (33:06):
Efficient, you know, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2 (33:09):
Or art I mean, that's a whole different can of worms.
You know, that's entirely subjective. Like is you might find
one drummer that says less is more. You just need
to provide that basic backbeat and leave room, and then
you Stuart Copeland comes in the room and laughs and
(33:29):
punches you in the face because you look like sting.
Speaker 1 (33:32):
Thumps you in the head.
Speaker 3 (33:34):
You know.
Speaker 2 (33:34):
So that's that's entirely subjective when it comes to art,
like you know, you've been to a museum and seen
a twelve inch by twelve inch square painted red, and
then you've also seen Jackson Pollock or Free de Collo.
So again, it's just subjective as to simplicity. And maybe
(33:56):
I don't know, can you apply it to art?
Speaker 3 (33:58):
Am I wrong? There?
Speaker 1 (34:00):
No, not necessarily. I think that's a good point because
it's still it's it's subjectively valuing something, whether it's complexity
or whether it's simplicity. It's it doesn't mean it's right.
That's the point, right that. I think that's your point.
Is one's not right over the other.
Speaker 3 (34:17):
Yeah, I think that's my point.
Speaker 1 (34:19):
And then there's also plenty of circumstances where Akam's razor
just doesn't help very much, like very famously Ptolemy's idea
of the universe. The Earth is the center of the universe.
The geocentric universe, I think, is what it's called, where
the Earth is the center of the universe, the Sun,
the Moon, and all the planets and all the stars
(34:40):
revolve around Earth is known to be wrong now, but
for a long time that's what everyone thought until the
Copernican Revolution, where we realize that not a universe, but
our solar system is sun centered. The Sun is at
the center, and the Earth is actually moving around it.
The thing is is, if you look, if you look
(35:00):
at the explanations between the two, they are pretty close,
and one's not necessarily less simple than the other. And
if you put them side by side Ockham's razors, that
doesn't really help. You have to dig a little deeper
and figure it out that actually know this one's right
(35:22):
based on these observations. We think this one's right, but
it has nothing necessarily to do with complexity. And then
on the other side of the equation, just because something's
complex doesn't mean that it's wrong. So the next time
somebody starts flailing some Occam's razor stuff at you, you
tell them I'm gonna thump you. Do you want to
(35:45):
be thumped?
Speaker 3 (35:45):
You don'tump and everybody me, yeah.
Speaker 1 (35:49):
Well, because they're asking for it.
Speaker 3 (35:51):
Is it just a very mild act of violence? Yeah,
you don't want to be two. You don't want to
punch someone in the face.
Speaker 1 (35:58):
No, no, and plus I mean think you shouldn't you
shouldn't thump anybody and way I was totally kidding it. Okay, okay,
thanks for setting me up for that one. Sure. Oh
one other thing, A lot of people say that OCAM's
razor squashes free thought, So I think that does kind
of tie in with your art thing, you know what
I mean, like, feel free to go be complex, there's
nothing wrong with it, doesn't like not everything has to
(36:21):
be funneled through this Okham's razor thing and made simpler
just to make it better. Yeah, well, Chuck, we made
it through this one sort of It's better than Jackhammers.
Speaker 3 (36:32):
I'll tell you that I think you did well.
Speaker 1 (36:34):
I think you did as well man. That means that
it was a good episode. If you want to learn
more about Akham's razor, you could read my SOSO article
on the site how Stuffworks dot com. Just type it
in the search bar. And since I said so, so
it's time for a listener mail.
Speaker 2 (36:51):
All right, I'm gonna call this North Korea Part two.
We heard from a woman in Australia. We were corrected.
It just starts with a nest.
Speaker 3 (37:00):
There is no.
Speaker 2 (37:00):
Awe, right, a woman in Australia named Claire Sutherland who
actually had an interaction away with North Korea when she
was editor at Australian newspaper called Little m Big X.
Speaker 3 (37:16):
Okay, it's MX.
Speaker 1 (37:17):
But it's just X.
Speaker 3 (37:20):
Oh is it No? I don't know know.
Speaker 1 (37:22):
They don't say awe before Australia.
Speaker 3 (37:24):
So oh, I got you.
Speaker 1 (37:25):
Probably not the Little Lamp.
Speaker 2 (37:27):
Well, she's based in Elbourne and they have editions in Melbourne,
Sydney and Brisbane. And she says, during the London Olympics
in our daily metal tally graphic, we listed North and
South Korea as a naughty Korea and nice Korea. Just
kind of a cheeky thing, I guess, she said. We've
been doing this for about a week when we received
a call from a Wall Street Journal reporter based in
(37:49):
Seoul seeking comment about the fact that North Korea just
issued an official condemnation of our paper and its editor.
Speaker 3 (37:57):
At first, our assumption was.
Speaker 2 (37:58):
We were being punked, but he directed us to the
official PR website of North Korea. Sure enough, there was
a flowery diatribe and Communist English which misnamed their paper
Metro by the Way, and called us sordid bullying and
petty thieves, declaring we would be cursed long in Olympic history.
(38:21):
I think my favorite extract is this, She says, editors
of the paper were so incompetent as to tarnish the
reputation of the paper by themselves by producing the article
like that. There is a saying a straw may show
which way the wind blows, a single article may exhibit
the level of the paper. Wow came down on her,
(38:41):
She says. The Wall Street Journal described the official statement
as most unusual, and we ended up making some minor
international headlines because of it. We ran the statement in
full with a story about our sudden entry into world
affairs on the front page. The headline was North Korea
fires missive. At the time we thought it was equal
parts ridiculous and funny. It happened today at probably try
(39:04):
and arrange new identities for me and my staff. Anyway,
thanks from me and my dog for the show. Looking
forward to seeing you in Melbourne. That is from Claire Sutherland.
Speaker 1 (39:15):
Thanks Claire, that was a great story. Well you really
want this one over, don't you.
Speaker 3 (39:21):
Sure?
Speaker 1 (39:23):
If you want to get in touch with me and
Chuck with a great story, you can tweet to us,
I'm at Josh M. Clark, Chuck's at movie Crush, We're
both at s YSK podcast. Chuck's on Facebook dot com
slash Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and we're at Facebook dot
com slash stuff You should know. You can send us
an email to Stuff Podcast at HowStuffWorks dot com and
is always joining us at our home on the web,
(39:43):
Stuff youshould know dot com For more on this and
thousands of other topics. What is it HowStuffWorks dot com
It's Josh coming back at you hot with our twenty
eighteen joint on Ockham's razor, one of the more semi
understood scientific principles, but it's also probably the most widely
used of them, all too or misused. I guess I
should say we have a medieval monk who became one
of the early proto scientists to thank for Ockham's razor,
(00:22):
which makes him a hero to science. And here's our
episode on that hero. Welcome to Stuff you Should Know
from HowStuffWorks dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
(00:42):
I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and
there's guest producer Tristan over there. So it's stuff you
should Know.
Speaker 2 (00:50):
I don't know how these are going to release, but
as you've noticed, Tristan weirdly grew out his mustache in
the last hour.
Speaker 3 (00:56):
Again, he's quick, he's very past.
Speaker 1 (01:00):
He can make it go in and out, in and out.
Speaker 3 (01:03):
What is that.
Speaker 1 (01:05):
It's like he's growing his mustache and it's sucking it
back in. Oh, okay, sucking it back in. No, No,
like a reverse Plato. Right, do you remember that Plato
set with the.
Speaker 3 (01:15):
Like a little meat grinder.
Speaker 1 (01:18):
No, there was one where like you could grow a
mustache on it, dude.
Speaker 3 (01:21):
Correctly, I think I remember that.
Speaker 1 (01:23):
Yeah, but imagine if you could reverse it too.
Speaker 3 (01:26):
It was called the Plato Nightmare set.
Speaker 1 (01:30):
Yeah. Is that your nightmare? Growing a Plato mustache? Waking
up like that?
Speaker 2 (01:36):
Yeah, I've had that dream about once a week for
about thirty five years.
Speaker 1 (01:40):
Like all the rest of you is chuck, but just
your mustache is Wallace and Grommet.
Speaker 3 (01:45):
Yeah, dude.
Speaker 2 (01:46):
Yesterday, I uh, there was a bad smell. Emily and
I were having a glass of wine at a wine bar.
There was a bad smell nearby. I think it was
a dumpster or something, and they were growing fresh herbs
at the wine bar, and I rubbed a rosemary bush
and then swiped it all over my mustache. And Emily's
(02:10):
mind was blown. She was just like, oh my god,
Like I can't believe, Like that's an actual use for
facial hair.
Speaker 1 (02:19):
Yeah, I guess it just to.
Speaker 2 (02:20):
Hold in that smell. It was like, well, you can
wipe it on your upper lip. It's probably the same thing. Sure,
maybe the hair retains more.
Speaker 1 (02:28):
Essential oils. I don't know, maybe which essential oils. Man,
people are clamoring for that episode.
Speaker 3 (02:34):
Yeah, we should do that.
Speaker 1 (02:35):
We will eventually.
Speaker 3 (02:36):
It's been a big part of my life for ten
and twelve years.
Speaker 1 (02:38):
Now, Essential Oils. We'll talk about it someday, but not today.
Speaker 2 (02:43):
No, no, because Chuck's gonna stumble through a philosophy podcast.
Speaker 1 (02:48):
It's a yeah, I guess it is philosophy. It's the
philosophy of knowledge. Epistemology is another way to put it.
But specifically, Chuck, we're talking today about a little ditty
you may have heard of before called OCAM's razor.
Speaker 3 (03:03):
Called the Gambler?
Speaker 1 (03:04):
Have you? Have you ever you've heard of Okham's razor before?
Speaker 2 (03:08):
Right, Well, so much so that I thought for sure
we had covered this, But I realized that we just
talked about it quite a bit in the Uh Scientific
Method episode.
Speaker 1 (03:17):
I'm not at all surprised because a lot of people
say that the basis of science, which is how humans
approach nature in our universe and us and everything scientifically,
the basis of that is Ocham's razor. And if Okam's
razor sounds familiar but you can't quite place it, you've
probably heard it as something like given two possible outcomes
(03:42):
or explanations or whatever. The simplest version is probably the
right one.
Speaker 2 (03:49):
Yeah, it's a pretty even that in its simplicity is beautiful.
The mere statement itself is an example of its simplicity
and how wonderful can be just to think, like, yeah,
you know what, let's get through all the gobbledygook. I
think the easiest way to explain this. Whether it's a
(04:10):
A H A A what do you call the orb
in a photos?
Speaker 3 (04:16):
Yeah, it's not.
Speaker 2 (04:17):
It's not your great grandfather coming to visit you on
a different plane. It's really just an error with your photographs.
Speaker 1 (04:25):
It's the flash, yeah, reflecting off a like water vapor
in the air.
Speaker 3 (04:32):
Or Kennedy probably acted alone.
Speaker 1 (04:34):
Kennedy he shot himself from Afar.
Speaker 2 (04:39):
Yeah, I clearly meant to say Oswald acted alone, because
that is the simplest explanation, not this very convoluted, deep
plot that goes that one hundred people were involved in
to assassinate Kennedy.
Speaker 1 (04:56):
So we'll talk about all that because it's a teaser.
What you're doing right now is has become pretty standard.
You're using Okham's razor to disprove other people's points.
Speaker 3 (05:06):
Yeah, there's this is.
Speaker 1 (05:08):
A total and complete misuse of Okham's razors not the
original intention. The original intention had nothing to do with
saying that's wrong. It is just a heuristic device, a guide,
a rule of thumb that tells you that, because things
tend to be more simple in the universe, if you
(05:32):
if you're doing something, don't make it harder than it
has to be. Don't add more to it than is
needed to get the job done. And there's actually a
couple of ways to put this, and both of them
get attributed to William of Ockham, who will talk about
in a second.
Speaker 3 (05:46):
Yeah, Billy Ockham.
Speaker 1 (05:47):
But one is called he sounds like a baseball manager.
Speaker 3 (05:50):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (05:51):
But one is called the principle of plurality.
Speaker 3 (05:54):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (05:54):
Harder to say fast than you would think it is,
And that is translated from the Latin plurality should not
be positive without necessity. And the other is the principle
of parsimony, which is it is pointless to do with
more what is done with less. From what I understand,
they are one and the same. Oh really, I could
(06:14):
not find anyone who could explain the difference. And I
see them interchangeably, not just like on some dude's blog,
but I'm like, you know, it's the Internet Encyclopedia philosophy
or the Stanford Encyclopedia philosophy, Like they don't seem to
be different.
Speaker 2 (06:34):
Well, parsimony, it seems different to me because that specifically
is like not using resources, not spending money if you
don't have to. And that seems different than plurality.
Speaker 1 (06:46):
Okay, well then then let's explore it. So plurality adding
to something, doubling something, maybe just making it more than
just the singular. He's saying plurality should not be positive
without necessity. Right, So I guess what he's saying. Then
if they are different, then if you're if you're guessing
at something, if you're trying to explain something, don't make
(07:08):
it harder than it is, don't make it bigger than
is absolutely necessary to explain it.
Speaker 3 (07:13):
Yeah, that makes sense.
Speaker 1 (07:15):
Or and this is a really big point that we'll
see in a minute. William of Occam really was saying,
don't don't add on to something beyond what you know
to be true and correct, which a lot of people
over time, and I think he actually maybe explicitly was
an impirsist have said William of Ockham was an Impisis.
(07:35):
He was saying that you need to experience things through
your senses to know that they are true.
Speaker 2 (07:43):
Yes, empirical evidence if I can look at it or
smell it, or taste it or feel it.
Speaker 3 (07:48):
What's the fifth one?
Speaker 1 (07:50):
Uh, tickle it, tickle it.
Speaker 2 (07:52):
And then the sixth one, of course we know means
Bruce Willis is really dead.
Speaker 1 (07:56):
See the ghost of it.
Speaker 2 (07:59):
Yeah, if there is no empirical evidence, if you cannot
experience it with one of your senses, then.
Speaker 3 (08:05):
It's it's poo pooed.
Speaker 1 (08:07):
So so it is so. And those two things, like
you really especially modern science, especially science these days, you
put them together. It's given two things. Go with the
simpler explanation, and you don't don't believe anything that you
can't sense one way or another through your sensus empirically. Right,
you put those together, you have the basis for modern science.
(08:28):
And so the idea that that that things that are
simpler are better, or the idea that the universe is simpler,
Like when you start to think about it, it's all
over the place, right, Like the the idea that the
universe is based on simpler being better is found everywhere. Right, So,
(08:48):
like there's things that things have fewer parts, things that
require less energy, the encapsulation of larger ideas into smaller
amounts of words or theories or whatever. All these things
are very much prized by humanity. So it just kind
of makes sense that Okham's razor is a sensible thing
(09:10):
and that you could actually use it to uncover the
mysteries of the universe. Yeah, but again, that's not really
necessarily the case, to tell you the truth.
Speaker 2 (09:18):
No, I mean, there's there's gonna be a lot of
uh and and this stuff is kind of fun, just
a lot of back and forth on Occam's razor throughout
this whole thing, because there is no its and that's
kind of part of the whole jam of Ockham's raiser
is there is no right or wrong here, right.
Speaker 3 (09:34):
You know what's weird is that? Right?
Speaker 1 (09:37):
A lot of people point to it though that it's
oh this is right. I just proved you wrong and
that's just not true. Man.
Speaker 3 (09:44):
All right, should we take a break early?
Speaker 1 (09:47):
Okay?
Speaker 3 (09:47):
Yeah, I think we should take a break.
Speaker 2 (09:49):
Now because I need to get my head wrapped around
this and we'll come back getting the way back machine
and visit Billy Ockham.
Speaker 1 (09:55):
Okay, so now Billy Ockham sounds like a nineteen eighties
(10:21):
recording star. Oh sure, like Billy Ocean.
Speaker 2 (10:25):
Yeah, get off of my razor and get into my car.
Speaker 1 (10:30):
Was this so we should say the razor too. It's
a philosophical term, so term of philosophy, the razor used
to scrape away unnecessary stuff. So it's Okham's razor. So
let's go back and meet Billy Ockham, shall we.
Speaker 3 (10:51):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (10:51):
And you wrote this by the way back in your
in your article writing Days, and you point out very Astutelee,
that this is from a time in our history of
the world where you might not have had a surname.
You may have been William of Ocham, which is the
case here, which is in England. And he lived between
about twelve eighty five and thirteen forty nine, and he
(11:15):
was a philosophical dude and a Franciscan monk, and he
very much like you point out, took his valid poverty
very seriously and lived a very meager, humble life.
Speaker 1 (11:28):
Yeah he did. He also expected the church to take
the same vow Potterphy, and he actually butted heads with
the church quite a bit, so much so that he
ended up getting excommunicated, as we'll see, but he was
the real deal as far as like a true believer went.
The weird thing about William of Ocham was that he
was also a genuinely independent theeker and a rationalist, which
(11:54):
at the time rationalism and the church did not go
hand in hand. They were there was really not much rationalism.
So for an idea, the idea for this this upstart
Franciscan monk to start questioning the ideas of the church,
and not only that, but how the leaders of the
church conducted themselves, and how much money they surrounded themselves with,
(12:17):
and how much power they had politically. This is it
was a big deal, right.
Speaker 3 (12:21):
Yeah, And he is not.
Speaker 2 (12:22):
He did not invent this line of thought as much
as he's probably attributed to this to people that just
know him from like a jeopardy board. This is already
a line of thought well established by this time in
the medieval times, and he was just he kind of
boiled it down to those two sentences that you were
talking about so anyone could understand it. He could put
(12:46):
it on a bumper sticker and a T shirt and
sell it, right.
Speaker 1 (12:49):
So it was Aristotle who was the guy who came
up with this idea first, that simplicity equals perfection, and
perfection equals simplicity. Said, the more perfect a nature is,
the fewer means it requires for its operation.
Speaker 3 (13:02):
Right.
Speaker 1 (13:03):
I love that, So that makes sense.
Speaker 3 (13:05):
That speaks to me.
Speaker 1 (13:06):
But then over time, in between Aristotle and William it
kind of got expanded. So let me give you an
example of that same thought from Robert gross Test who
was an early scientist also a theologian I believe too.
Here is his version of it that is better and
more valuable, which requires fewer other circumstances being equal. For
(13:27):
if one thing we're demonstrated from many in another thing
from fewer equally known premises, clearly that is better, which
is from fewer because it makes us know quickly, just
as a universal demonstration is better than particular because it
produces knowledge from fewer premises. That similarly, in natural science,
in moral science, and in metaphysics, the best is that
(13:49):
which needs no premises, and that better that which needs
the fewer other circumstances being equal.
Speaker 3 (13:57):
Boy, the ironies there are rich.
Speaker 1 (13:59):
Right. So within less than one hundred years, William of
Auckham comes along, and he's just like plurality should not
be positive without necessity, Robert.
Speaker 3 (14:08):
Yeah, And Robert was like, well, yeah, I guess that's
one way you could say it.
Speaker 1 (14:12):
So I want to say something though, before we keep going, Chuck,
I actually found a correction of my own article, oh
that I missed before.
Speaker 3 (14:21):
What's that?
Speaker 1 (14:22):
It turns out that they think now that another theologian
slash scientist from William of Ockham's era named John Dunn
scottis was the one who really encapsulated this principle of
plurality and principle of parsimony, and that it was a
guy from the nineteenth century, William Rowan Hamilton, a British mathematician,
(14:45):
that he was the one who misattributed it to William
of Ockham.
Speaker 2 (14:48):
So is William of Aukham just a a know nothing, No, No,
His writings definitely included this stuff, and he never took
credit for this, Okay, But they think think that it
was actually John's done.
Speaker 1 (15:03):
Scott is who who encapsulated it the way that we
tend to think of it now.
Speaker 3 (15:08):
So he's sold the bumper stickers.
Speaker 1 (15:09):
But right, But William Levacam thought this way, and he
was a radical thinker and a rationalist, as we'll.
Speaker 2 (15:15):
See, right, and like you kind of teased out earlier,
he did butt heads with the church over this. He
wrote a lot about it, and the church was not
into it, and Pope John the what is that twenty second?
They kind of squared off on this, and of course
the Pope wins all battles, at least back then, and
(15:37):
he was excommunicated in several of his his monk brothers
and I take that to mean not real brothers, right right,
were excommunicated. In thirteen twenty eight, he went to Munich
seeking refuge. He was protected there by Emperor Louis the fourth,
and ultimately he went out because he started right about
(16:01):
Pope John the twenty second, saying he's a heretic, and
people ultimately believed him.
Speaker 3 (16:06):
Right.
Speaker 1 (16:07):
He definitely made some pretty convincing points. And he also again,
like if you're saying I took a vout poverty, the
church really should too. And the church isn't poverty stricken
and you are. It gives you a little more credibility
from the outside as well. Sure, so there's some reasons
why William of Waucam is this theologian, a devout Franciscan
(16:27):
Monk is looked upon as one of the fathers of
Western science, like the foundation of Western science right, or
science in general. And the reason why is he argued
against the prevailing ideas at the time, which is called
medieval synthesis. And this is very much championed by Thomas Aquinas,
(16:48):
who's a famous theologian. I believe he was a saint
and one of the reasons he was canonized was because
of this. Thinking about this, But the whole medieval synthesis
thing was that God was first and foremost everything. Right,
you were a member of the church just as much
as you were a member of your country, a citizen
(17:09):
of your country. All human knowledge came from God, and
Thomas Aquinas it wasn't just like the end. Thomas Aquinas
used philosophy to prove that sentiment that all human knowledge
came from God, and here is how. And basically it
took the idea of cause and effect and said that
you can trace every effect back to a cause, back
(17:30):
to another effect, back to another cause, but ultimately you
were going to end up on God, and that all
of our conceptions of everything arose from God's conception, and
that God willed that we understand things this way, which
means that this is the perfect way to understand it,
which means it's right right. So that is not what
William Wackam thought. He was again a rationalist who said, no,
(17:53):
we tend to think things are things because that arises
in the human mind from cognition, not from God. And
this dude was not a heretic. He believed that you
didn't apply rationalism to God, that God required faith, sure,
and rationalism stood on its own it was a different thing.
And you couldn't know God through your senses. God was elsewhere.
(18:17):
Leave God out of this. And the fact that he
was able to really successfully lay like a philosophical groundwork
for this, a rational groundwork for it's one thing today
to be like I'm a secular humanist, you know, I'm
rational to forget the church that's today. This is at
a time when this guy is saying this and the
(18:37):
church has the power to burn you at the stake.
Like he was a stand up rational thinker, right, which
kind of makes him a hero of rationality today. But don't.
And this is another perfect example of how Accam's razor
gets confused. Accam himself gets confused too, he's a hero
of science, but it was also one of the more
devout human beings walking the earth at the time. It
(19:00):
was a monk for basically his whole life.
Speaker 3 (19:02):
And also had a metal band called Medieval Synthesis.
Speaker 1 (19:06):
Oh that is a good name, isn't it.
Speaker 3 (19:07):
So he was just a conundrum.
Speaker 1 (19:09):
Yeah, he was a conundrum for sure. And again he
got excommunicated. He had to escape by horse stolen horse. Oh,
I mean he was not very monk like.
Speaker 3 (19:19):
No, But all right, So.
Speaker 2 (19:21):
We were talking earlier about empirical evidence and how that
kind of fits in here, and the fact that if
you can't you know, like, you know the sky is
blue because you look up and you see it's blue.
You know a bird makes a whistle because you can
hear the bird make a whistle.
Speaker 3 (19:37):
So it's very easy to sort of use.
Speaker 2 (19:41):
That and say sure, but if you don't, if you
can't see it or hear it empirically or any of
the senses experience it, it's very easy to poo poo.
And you give a great example here with Lorenz and
Einstein and kind of which one would win out. So
both of these guys, both physicists, Einstein obviously more popular
(20:05):
will see. For a very important reason. They both had
the conclusion mathematically that with the space time continuum, the
closer we get to moving at the speed of light,
the more we slow down, which is hard to wrap
your head around. So Lorenz comes out and says, explains
it away because of changes that take place in the ether,
which he might as well have said, a bit of
(20:26):
magic happens. Einstein didn't, and so the one we talk
about today is Einstein and not Lorenz. That explanation of
Einstein was more rooted in science, and he didn't say
something wacky like the ether, which is something empirically you
can't see or smell or taste. So Einstein, you know,
(20:47):
he won that great battle.
Speaker 1 (20:49):
Yeah, he very famously said, He goes, I don't know
what's what, but I know it ain't got nothing to
do with no ether.
Speaker 2 (21:00):
My brain's gonna end up in a jar in some
guy's garage in New Jersey, right.
Speaker 1 (21:03):
And everybody will love that picture of me with my
tongue sticking.
Speaker 3 (21:07):
Out, and Walter Mattho will play me in a romantic comedy.
Speaker 1 (21:10):
So Laurence violated that principle of plurality. Right. He added
something to this that required an additional basically like a
leap of faith. There was no empirical evidence that there
was such a thing as the ether.
Speaker 3 (21:23):
And he said, did I say ether? And I didn't
mean ether? And never went no, no, no to.
Speaker 1 (21:27):
You, late Laurent.
Speaker 3 (21:28):
Well we heard you, buddy.
Speaker 1 (21:30):
And he's still I mean, he's a respected he's a
respected physicist.
Speaker 3 (21:33):
Still.
Speaker 1 (21:33):
It's not like he was some crackpot or anything like that,
because if you put his equations in Einstein's equations side
by side, they came to the same conclusions. It was
just explaining how Lorenz seems to have misstepped right, right,
But he was obviously at least as brilliant as Einstein.
When it comes to that, he's just a little nuts apparently.
So he violates the principle of plurality. And now we
(21:56):
understand relativity rather than Lorenz's manic raven Yeah.
Speaker 2 (22:00):
And I don't believe we mentioned there's a word for that.
If you can't prove it empirically, it doesn't exist. It's
called positivism. Yes, positivism isn't about having a good.
Speaker 1 (22:09):
Attitude, right, and so this is and this also happened
during Einstein's working days too. There was a guy named
Ernest Mack, and Ernest Mock was so Ernst Mack, thank you. Yeah,
that's that's way better than Ernest. Ernst Mock. He was
so nuts on empiricism. He was a he was an
(22:31):
early I think he was a physicist, if not a mathematician,
one of the two. And he he basically said, like,
molecules don't exist. All this whole bubble over molecules and
atoms and all this stuff, you're all crazy. We can't
see him. They don't exist. So there's a there's this
kind of ironic twist that came from Einstein's working career
(22:51):
where he actually he beat Lorenz, his rival, to this
theory through this through Okham's raiser. But he also disproved
this idea of that Ernest Mock, this thing about only
believing what you can sense with your your senses, this
(23:11):
kind of other part of Okham's razor, in a subsequent
paper that came a few years later that showed that
molecules do exist. So the idea that that OCAM's razor
can be used both ways is something that just keeps
coming up again and again and again. And we'll we'll
talk about how after a break. How about that? Okay, Chuck, So,
(23:56):
who who uses Okham's raiser? Obviously everyone who was throwing
money down on the cockfight between Lorentz and Einstein were
using Okaham's rais? Were they all went with Einstein's because
this was the simplest.
Speaker 3 (24:09):
Right, Yeah?
Speaker 1 (24:10):
Who else uses it?
Speaker 3 (24:12):
Well?
Speaker 2 (24:12):
I mean you have a great section in this article
about skeptics, and I know over the years of the show,
over the past ten years, we've had a lot of
minor scraps with the skeptic community.
Speaker 1 (24:25):
That's a pretty minor Is that fair to say?
Speaker 2 (24:27):
Yeah, because I mean we have our skeptical side for sure,
but they're you know, when it comes to skepticism and skeptics,
it's sort of on a sliding scale. There's a range
of how you might feel about certain things, and you
very astutely, i think, point out that if you are
a true skeptic, then you will not use Akham's raiser
(24:47):
like I did earlier as a tool to disprove something right,
that you will only use it as a tool to
consider different explanations. And that's there's a big difference there.
Speaker 1 (25:00):
There is so like like that whole idea of seeing
a ghost on film. Right, So there there's there's this
example where somebody could say, so you just explained something
about light and refracting and something with the film and
there was moisture in the air. What's Isn't it just
(25:21):
simpler to say, no, that was a ghost exactly. And
in that case, if you were a skeptic, you would
you would you're you pull a little tuft of your
hair out, maybe just start scraping at your cheeks until
you bleed. Uh. Ideally, what you would say is I
get what you're saying, but you're bringing something into this
(25:42):
that we don't know exists. Like we do know light exists,
we do know it refracts off of vapor, we do
know how this can be captured on film. So yes,
that sounds very complicated. But the the ghosts don't exist
as far as we know. We can't send the empirically.
But I would keep my mind open to the idea
(26:02):
that ghosts could consumably exist. The fact that I just
showed that this is reflect the reflection of light off
of water vapor in this graveyard does not mean that
your hypothesis about ghosts existing is wrong. It just means
that's what's in this picture? Right, that's a true skeptic.
Speaker 2 (26:20):
Right, because because things happen and they can later on,
the more fantastical explanation could.
Speaker 3 (26:27):
Be true and has been true. Uh. And you point
out very.
Speaker 2 (26:33):
Very plainly here that there's a couple of problems with this,
and to me, this kind of says it all, is
that it's subjective. Like the whole notion of determining is
this is the most simple explanation is completely subjective because
the ghost explanation, one person might say, no, the ghost
explanation is clearly the simplest because I can just say
(26:54):
one word ghost, see there, and then you could fire
right back. Well know, I can fire back two words
photographic mishap, right, or maybe just mishapp Yeah, if they
want to keep it completely equal, And that's the most simple.
So it's completely subjective as to which one or anything
(27:14):
that it's the most simple.
Speaker 1 (27:16):
Right exactly. And then again the idea that you can
use Acam's razor to disprove something just by showing that
that it's not the simplest explanation, that doesn't that's not correct,
that's not right, And so scientists will use Occam's razor
and all sorts of different disciplines like for example, if
you're making an artificial neural network, right, like a learning machine,
(27:39):
you might use decision trees, and you will use some
sort of simple decision tree over a more complicated one
that can get the same job done. That doesn't mean
that it's necessarily the right one, but there are demonstrably
good reasons for picking a simpler one over. It's less
likely to break, it takes less time, it takes less
(28:00):
energy to come to the computations. There are things that
are valuable about it, but it doesn't mean that the
other one is just wrong. And again, when you're using
Okham's razors, say, if you're making a neural network, or
you're pouring through a data set or something like that,
or you're trying to interpret a big data set, yeah,
you're making again like you're saying, not just a subjective
(28:24):
judgment about what's simpler. But that's all there is to it.
You're making a subjective judgment about what's simpler, not what's right.
It's not saying what's right. And this is a recurring
theme that you just have to know because there's so
many people out there that use Okham's razor to disprove
other people's ideas, and that's just not at all what
(28:47):
it was originally intended for. It's just a complete perversion
of it and it's just wrong, and that's not how
science works. So if you see somebody out there doing this,
thump them in the forehead.
Speaker 2 (28:58):
Yeah and boy, then when you get into the outle
it gets really interesting because this is sort of a
prime example of the simplest explanation from a believer's point
of view, is very easy to say, No, the Big
Bang is incredibly complex and complicated, and it's pretty clear
(29:18):
that the easiest explanation here and the simplest thing is
God created life in seven days, right, But that's also
discounting the process that it took God to create Earth,
if that's what you believe, and just kind of bundle
it up in a tidy package, say God created life.
The Big Bang is super complicated, so and very coincidental
(29:40):
if you really look at it. So this is the
simplest explanation, Okham Trazer proofs that God.
Speaker 1 (29:46):
Exists, right, And so that's been used time and time
again by creationists, right, or people who believe in ghosts
are people who counter empiricism in a lot of ways. Right, Yeah,
But on the other hand, you can you can find
atheists to use OCAM's razor to show that God does
not exist, because their point is if the universe tends
(30:09):
towards simplicity and God is perfect and simplicity is perfection,
then if God existed, the universe would be a lot
more simpler. There wouldn't be this big bang thing that
we have that happen it would You would be right creationists,
and the fact that you're wrong means that means that
there is no God, which is just like, my head's
starting to spin a little bit with this, But it's
(30:31):
a good example of how you can use OCAM's razor.
Both sides can use OCAM's razor to disprove the other
person's point, which against it shows how it's not meant
to be used that way.
Speaker 2 (30:41):
Well yeah, and then you point out too and talk
about a headspinner like something like photosynthesis is a pretty
complex mechanism in nature. But I mean, who's to say
that that isn't the simplest way to achieve food production
in a plant. Maybe that is the simplest.
Speaker 1 (30:58):
Yeah, we have no way of knowing that there is
a simpler model of the universe or photosynthesis or of
a shark or anything like that, and that even something
that does seem superfluous, we can't say that in the
larger scheme of things, that it's actually the simplest way
to do that, right. So like like a shark seems like, man,
(31:21):
maybe do you need that extra fin or something like that,
Or does a cow really need eight stomachs? Or do
we really need two kidneys?
Speaker 3 (31:29):
Right?
Speaker 1 (31:29):
But what this point is saying is that there's we
don't have the information to look at everything on such
a grand scheme of things to say no, there if
humans only had one kidney, this other larger system would
break down, and this is actually the simplest way to
do it, right.
Speaker 3 (31:44):
Or there's a cow with one stomach that we can
compare it to right.
Speaker 1 (31:47):
Right exactly, So this whole thing, this is the point, Chuck,
where I reach this very glaring idea that o COM's
razor or what Aristotle said that simplicity is perfection, that's
all man made, that's human made. Sure, that's a human
(32:08):
made concept. To value simplicity is human made. It is
possible the universe complicated you can come up with all
sorts of examples of the universe being seemingly pretty complicated.
Just the universe itself seems pretty complicated, frankly, right, So
that doesn't necessarily mean that the universe tends towards simplicity.
(32:29):
It seems like humans value simplicity and the universe uses
simplicity a lot, But that doesn't mean that simplicity is
perfection or correctness. That's a human construct.
Speaker 2 (32:41):
Well, yeah, and like let's say, in terms of engineering,
it's probably a decent model to think, hey, the more
complex the system is that I'm engineering, the more things
that are to break. So we should probably try and
make it as simple as possible. That still gets the
job done. But that's not to say that it can
be rudimentary, like you might need it might need to
(33:03):
be a little bit complicated to run at its most.
Speaker 1 (33:06):
Efficient, you know, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2 (33:09):
Or art I mean, that's a whole different can of worms.
You know, that's entirely subjective. Like is you might find
one drummer that says less is more. You just need
to provide that basic backbeat and leave room, and then
you Stuart Copeland comes in the room and laughs and
(33:29):
punches you in the face because you look like sting.
Speaker 1 (33:32):
Thumps you in the head.
Speaker 3 (33:34):
You know.
Speaker 2 (33:34):
So that's that's entirely subjective when it comes to art,
like you know, you've been to a museum and seen
a twelve inch by twelve inch square painted red, and
then you've also seen Jackson Pollock or Free de Collo.
So again, it's just subjective as to simplicity. And maybe
(33:56):
I don't know, can you apply it to art?
Speaker 3 (33:58):
Am I wrong? There?
Speaker 1 (34:00):
No, not necessarily. I think that's a good point because
it's still it's it's subjectively valuing something, whether it's complexity
or whether it's simplicity. It's it doesn't mean it's right.
That's the point, right that. I think that's your point.
Is one's not right over the other.
Speaker 3 (34:17):
Yeah, I think that's my point.
Speaker 1 (34:19):
And then there's also plenty of circumstances where Akam's razor
just doesn't help very much, like very famously Ptolemy's idea
of the universe. The Earth is the center of the universe.
The geocentric universe, I think, is what it's called, where
the Earth is the center of the universe, the Sun,
the Moon, and all the planets and all the stars
(34:40):
revolve around Earth is known to be wrong now, but
for a long time that's what everyone thought until the
Copernican Revolution, where we realize that not a universe, but
our solar system is sun centered. The Sun is at
the center, and the Earth is actually moving around it.
The thing is is, if you look, if you look
(35:00):
at the explanations between the two, they are pretty close,
and one's not necessarily less simple than the other. And
if you put them side by side Ockham's razors, that
doesn't really help. You have to dig a little deeper
and figure it out that actually know this one's right
(35:22):
based on these observations. We think this one's right, but
it has nothing necessarily to do with complexity. And then
on the other side of the equation, just because something's
complex doesn't mean that it's wrong. So the next time
somebody starts flailing some Occam's razor stuff at you, you
tell them I'm gonna thump you. Do you want to
(35:45):
be thumped?
Speaker 3 (35:45):
You don'tump and everybody me, yeah.
Speaker 1 (35:49):
Well, because they're asking for it.
Speaker 3 (35:51):
Is it just a very mild act of violence? Yeah,
you don't want to be two. You don't want to
punch someone in the face.
Speaker 1 (35:58):
No, no, and plus I mean think you shouldn't you
shouldn't thump anybody and way I was totally kidding it. Okay, okay,
thanks for setting me up for that one. Sure. Oh
one other thing, A lot of people say that OCAM's
razor squashes free thought, So I think that does kind
of tie in with your art thing, you know what
I mean, like, feel free to go be complex, there's
nothing wrong with it, doesn't like not everything has to
(36:21):
be funneled through this Okham's razor thing and made simpler
just to make it better. Yeah, well, Chuck, we made
it through this one sort of It's better than Jackhammers.
Speaker 3 (36:32):
I'll tell you that I think you did well.
Speaker 1 (36:34):
I think you did as well man. That means that
it was a good episode. If you want to learn
more about Akham's razor, you could read my SOSO article
on the site how Stuffworks dot com. Just type it
in the search bar. And since I said so, so
it's time for a listener mail.
Speaker 2 (36:51):
All right, I'm gonna call this North Korea Part two.
We heard from a woman in Australia. We were corrected.
It just starts with a nest.
Speaker 3 (37:00):
There is no.
Speaker 2 (37:00):
Awe, right, a woman in Australia named Claire Sutherland who
actually had an interaction away with North Korea when she
was editor at Australian newspaper called Little m Big X.
Speaker 3 (37:16):
Okay, it's MX.
Speaker 1 (37:17):
But it's just X.
Speaker 3 (37:20):
Oh is it No? I don't know know.
Speaker 1 (37:22):
They don't say awe before Australia.
Speaker 3 (37:24):
So oh, I got you.
Speaker 1 (37:25):
Probably not the Little Lamp.
Speaker 2 (37:27):
Well, she's based in Elbourne and they have editions in Melbourne,
Sydney and Brisbane. And she says, during the London Olympics
in our daily metal tally graphic, we listed North and
South Korea as a naughty Korea and nice Korea. Just
kind of a cheeky thing, I guess, she said. We've
been doing this for about a week when we received
a call from a Wall Street Journal reporter based in
(37:49):
Seoul seeking comment about the fact that North Korea just
issued an official condemnation of our paper and its editor.
Speaker 3 (37:57):
At first, our assumption was.
Speaker 2 (37:58):
We were being punked, but he directed us to the
official PR website of North Korea. Sure enough, there was
a flowery diatribe and Communist English which misnamed their paper
Metro by the Way, and called us sordid bullying and
petty thieves, declaring we would be cursed long in Olympic history.
(38:21):
I think my favorite extract is this, She says, editors
of the paper were so incompetent as to tarnish the
reputation of the paper by themselves by producing the article
like that. There is a saying a straw may show
which way the wind blows, a single article may exhibit
the level of the paper. Wow came down on her,
(38:41):
She says. The Wall Street Journal described the official statement
as most unusual, and we ended up making some minor
international headlines because of it. We ran the statement in
full with a story about our sudden entry into world
affairs on the front page. The headline was North Korea
fires missive. At the time we thought it was equal
parts ridiculous and funny. It happened today at probably try
(39:04):
and arrange new identities for me and my staff. Anyway,
thanks from me and my dog for the show. Looking
forward to seeing you in Melbourne. That is from Claire Sutherland.
Speaker 1 (39:15):
Thanks Claire, that was a great story. Well you really
want this one over, don't you.
Speaker 3 (39:21):
Sure?
Speaker 1 (39:23):
If you want to get in touch with me and
Chuck with a great story, you can tweet to us,
I'm at Josh M. Clark, Chuck's at movie Crush, We're
both at s YSK podcast. Chuck's on Facebook dot com
slash Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and we're at Facebook dot
com slash stuff You should know. You can send us
an email to Stuff Podcast at HowStuffWorks dot com and
is always joining us at our home on the web,
(39:43):
Stuff youshould know dot com For more on this and
thousands of other topics. What is it HowStuffWorks dot com
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