From the Vault: 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. (Originally published 2/13/2020)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday.
Time to go into the vault for a classic episode
of the show. This one originally published on February and
it's about Acam's Razor. Yeah, this one, this one is
a lot of fun we get into. You know, we
discussed scientific thinking and speculative thinking. Uh, we discussed the

(00:27):
name of the rose a little bit for obvious reasons
that this one was fun. There's some some history, some science.
Everything you want. Dr wonderful. Welcome to Stuff to Blow
your Mind, a production of I Heart Radios How Stuff Work. Hey,

(00:48):
welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is
Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And today we're going
to discuss a problem solving principles that many of you
have probably heard of 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

(01:08):
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 deployed in ways that do not actually
make use of its value, right, Like like an actual
razor blade may be misused from time to time. Now,

(01:29):
one specific place that I know we've talked about it
before is that is in the context of Carl Sagan's
recommendations for the tools of skeptical thinking. Uh. He lays
these out, and one of them is Occam's razor. He writes,
Occam's razor. This convenient rule of thumb urges us, when
faced with two hypotheses that explain the data equally well,

(01:50):
to choose the simpler. Okay, Now, why do we end
up talking about this today. We were in the studio
the other day, uh, discussing upcoming episodes, and you said
that Seth mentioned this, our our producer, Seth. Yeah. 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

(02:12):
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 Ockhams raiser um. But anyway, we 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 critical thinking is is

(02:35):
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 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

(02:57):
the concept of Ockham's raz or, at least the first
time I encounter unded it, and it on some level
stuck with me. And that was when I view the
film adaptation of Carl Sagan's novel Contact. The movie I
can't watch without crying. Oh yeah, yeah, well why does
it make you cry? Oh God, there's no no, It's

(03:18):
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 I get
so emotional. I don't know, 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

(03:41):
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 is now he's just
like this ageless demon. But anyway, he has his character,
he's playing his character named Palmer Joss. Uh huh. And
in the scene in question, Foster's character brings up Acam's

(04:04):
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 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 characters
encounter with an extraterrestrial intelligence. Right, is it more likely

(04:28):
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 closure. Yeah, and so yeah,
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

(04:49):
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
because it highlights some of the most common features of
Occam'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

(05:11):
your intuitions about the probability of something. Right. But another
thing is that this example shows how it's not always
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,

(05:32):
like like what kind of objective measure can you come
up with to evaluate that question? Right, It's going to
depend so much on your like your background, your culture,
what you grew up with, and just 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

(05:53):
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 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

(06:13):
like when people use the idea of Okham's razor in
a way that is not helpful and doesn't really it
doesn't really get you any closer to figuring out 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

(06:35):
let's go ahead and to start about the concept itself
the word acum uh. And you know where this comes from.
We'll get to the origins of akamas 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,

(06:57):
you want to be cheap with your with your logic, right, yeah,
I don't need more than two steps of logic between
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 Ockom Uh. So he he lived in the
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, from twelve eighty five to either

(07:19):
thirteen forty seven or thirteen forty nine. I've seen different
death dates given for him. I've seen different birthdates as well.
At twelve eighty seven or twelve eighty eight, That's 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 Ocum. I've never heard of that. Well, yeah,

(07:39):
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
village in Surrey, England. You can look it up online.
You can find out the website for the church in Ocum,
for example. And this area has been occupied since ancient times.
It's about a day's ride south best of London, and

(08:01):
it was the birthplace of the individual who had come
to be known as William of Ockham. Now beyond that,
beyond 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

(08:21):
Spade explains in The Cambridge Companion to Ockham, he was
likely given over to the Franciscan Order as a young
boy before the age of fourteen, and here Latin would
have quickly become his language of of of not only writing,
but also just conversation. Gray Friar's convent in London was
likely his home convent, but later he traveled. He visited Avignon,

(08:44):
he visited Italy, and he lived the last two decades
of his life in Germany. Now, philosophically, William was a nominalist,
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

(09:05):
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,
the rejection of universals is perhaps best considered, and this
is very brief and broad. Certainly you can find so
much written and set on this topic, but basically, think

(09:27):
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 whom I design and carve
and a symbol are an attempt to 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

(09:47):
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 over here. There
is no chair right like this. This is the kind
of the situation one gets it too when you get
into like the genre classifications of say albums, artists or

(10:09):
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, no, 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

(10:30):
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 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

(10:56):
while our Aristotle defined ten categories of objects that might
be apprehended by a human mind, and these would have
been uh translations, very on on how you wanted to
find these. But substance, quantity, quality, relative place, time, attitude, condition, action,
and affection. William cut these down to two substance and quality.

(11:18):
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 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 concern, the principle of parsimony, known as Acam's razor. Okay,

(11:40):
so we're getting to the razor here. Yeah. So William
devoted a lot of energy to arguing against what Spade
calls the 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

(12:04):
on his Thoughts and Ideas titled on the Principles of Theology.
Now 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 Akham's razor. Uh. However, this specific phrase was apparently

(12:27):
never actually used by him. He never said Ackham in
the house, 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,
Okham'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,

(12:50):
he summed it up in different different manners. Uh. In
Spade includes includes a few examples of this in his work.
For instance, here, here's some quotes from Akam. Beings are
not to be multiplied beyond necessity or plurality, is not
to be a positive without necessity or what can happen
through fewer principles happens in Vain through more and there

(13:11):
are other there are other examples of this as well.
We're 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

(13:32):
that are not necessary. Yeah, and also just don't take
more steps they are necessary to get from point A
to point B than 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

(13:54):
complicated one that makes more assumptions. Now here's another fun
fact about William of Aucham. William Ackom is key to
Elmberto Echo's excellent novel The Name of the Rose. Uh.
This was a novel that was published in nineteen eighty.
Many of you may be familiar with the certainly the
the film adaptation that starred Sean Connery, f Murray, Abraham Um,

(14:16):
Christian Slater in a host of wonderful character actors. And
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

(14:39):
a mash up of William of Ockam and Sherlock Holmes,
thus the Baskerville alluding to uh Hound of the Baskerville's.
Then 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 they're also other I think interpretations

(15:02):
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? 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.

(15:24):
It was Roger Bacon. 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

(15:45):
Acam's Rose, and she pointed out that Echo had apparently
explored the possibility of simply using Ackam 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

(16:07):
up of ACoM 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 Olcom. She writes,

(16:28):
quote in thirty seven, the year in which the name
of the Roses set, ACoM faced fifty six charges of
heresy 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.

(16:51):
She also points out that Ackom, 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 Acams 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

(17:13):
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 Akam. 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 utilized by other thinkers of the

(17:36):
day and thinkers before him. One great example of somebody
not before William of Acham but later articulating similar ideas
is Isaac Newton in his great work The Principia Mathematica.
From 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. Uh So, a similar

(17:59):
idea is 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. Right. 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 of two
forces that explain what we see, gravity and inertia. Inertia

(18:24):
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 of
traveling in a straight line, their path bends around towards
the Sun as they travel. And so that those two

(18:47):
things are both true, and they explain everything we observed,
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 gravi d and inertia, there
are angels that guide the planets in their orbits because
those elliptical pathways are pleasing to the Lord. But if

(19:08):
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 in some sense, would not see any reason to
believe that there are angels doing that, because there are

(19:28):
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 door 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 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

(19:51):
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. And 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

(20:12):
do anymore work. Yeah, it doesn't even help angels out.
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 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

(20:34):
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 that I want to
refer to later by a philosopher named Elliott sober Uh,
he writes, quote Albert Einstein spoke for many when he

(20:55):
said quote, it can scarcely be denied that the supreme
goal of all the rie is to make the irreducible
basic elements as simple and as few as possible without
having to surrender the adequate representation of 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

(21:17):
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 of things that you
might argue we're sort of done away with by an
Acam's razor ish kind of process, though I think there
are some historians and philosophers of science that might disagree there.

(21:40):
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, 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

(22:02):
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 and too 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

(22:23):
of light. Now, there's another example from history that often
comes up when people talk about Okham's razor. It's often
brought up as a great example of Ockham's razor being applied.
But we're gonna get to an article later on that
I think 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

(22:45):
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 were also politics involved, but four, among
other things, advocating the Copernican model over the Polemic model. UH.
For simplicity's sake, the Copernican model of the Solar System

(23:08):
was of course the one we know to be more
basically correct, not totally correct, but more correct because it
was heliocentric. It put the Sun at the center of
the Solar System and argued that the other planets, including
the Earth, all rotated around the Sun. UH. This of
course was not the orthodox astronomy of the day. The
more favored models were the traditional Toolemic model, which had

(23:28):
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 like loops within their their traveling um. And then
you had some compromise models like the model of Tycho Brahi. Now,

(23:49):
the traditional argument here in favor of saying, you know,
Copernicus and Galileo were on the side of Occam's razor,
it would go something like, well, the Ptolemaic system and
the and the type Cobrahi models, they've got all this
extra stuff. You need to assume, all these weird extra assumptions,
like like epicycles, you know, like where the planets are

(24:09):
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 are our observations,
and therefore the Tolemaic model was more complex. We'll come
back to that later on, because I think now it's
going to be important to get into some criticisms of
Acams razor. You know, if you go into especially a

(24:31):
lot of like kind of skeptic communities on the Internet,
you might sometimes see people treating ocams razor as if
it is some kind of law of nature, like referring
to Akam's razor in the same way you might refer
to proven theories about reality, uh, such as you know,
the equations describing the action of gravity or something. Uh.

(24:52):
And so I think while OCAM'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 actual attacks on the usefulness of the razor, even

(25:14):
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 mystery writers, yeah, uh yeah,

(25:36):
I'm 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 Ockham's razor to
mean the simplest answer is usually correct, but the real
meaning what the Franciscan Friar William of Oakin really wanted
to emphasize is that you shouldn't complicate, that you shouldn't

(25:57):
stack a theory. If a simpler exploit nation 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 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

(26:17):
things that explain the 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

(26:38):
our ancestors lived at least partially in the water. Yeah.
The ideas you look at a lot of our body
features are relatively smooth skin, bipedalism, 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 more logical features that

(27:01):
are not the same 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.

(27:24):
But there's a 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

(27:45):
might say, oh, well, once you came onto the land,
it actually was useful to be bipedal for these other reasons,
and which useful to be hairless for these other reasons,
which means you could cut out an entire step of
having to be in the water to stick with these
are useful for living on the land exactly you, I'd
apply ACAM here and say, if those features turn out
to be useful on land, why wouldn't they just evolve

(28:05):
on land in the first place? Right, So there is
like you've you've you've been 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.

(28:26):
It would be hard to say this is impossible to
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

(28:48):
get the beer in the bread. I got the beer
at 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 won beer and bread. Uh. And

(29:08):
then you also may have stopped at the store, you know,
to get something else, but like, yeah, I stole beer
and bread, as like when the simple explanation is probably
probably just bought beer and bread. Where 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 OCAM's razor slices away the unnecessary steps,

(29:34):
the less likely steps for the the shorter trip between
point and point B. Right. And I think in cases
like that, you could say that ocums raizor doesn't necessarily
prove a theory wrong, but it is kind of a
useful heuristic. It might help you use your intellectual time wisely. Right. Uh.
But and and that gets us to the next step,

(29:55):
which is the more comprehensive criticism, the idea that ACAM
is maybe in act wrong, more 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 writer Philip Ball, one of my favorite

(30:16):
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 that.
I feel like this is one you can still be

(30:37):
newly amazed by and learn a lot more from 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, Ockham's razor is often stated as
an injunction not to make more assumptions than you absolutely need.

(30:58):
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 discuss this
a lot like committing science to UH to the work

(31:20):
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
acam's razer, 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

(31:41):
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,

(32:01):
a spy whom it's took them for another person. Well
that's possible too, but again, more far more steps that
are necessary, 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

(32:22):
complications that don't help the explanation explain anything more than
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

(32:44):
effect on the outcome. Applied this way, simplicity is a
practical virtue allowing a clearer view of what's most important
in a phenomenon. So again, he's saying there that okhams Razor.
It's it's not necessarily that Okams razor tells you what's true,
but Acams razor makes theories useful because then he goes

(33:05):
on to argue that Acam's razor is quote fetishized and
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.

(33:26):
Quote here, the the implication is the simplest theory isn't
just 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

(33:48):
that simpler theories better described nature than complicated ones, and
he gives a few examples. He talks about Francis Crick
warning against trying to apply Okham's razor as a critical
tool for theories and biology because biology gets really messy,
and he cites examples where it kind of led us astray.
Like he he cites Alfred Kempy's eighteen seventy nine proof

(34:09):
of the four color theorem and mathematics, which was kind
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

(34:32):
could you could apply the simplicity model to that and say, Okay,
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 yeah, yeah,
we're saying like some biological structure has evolved, you know,

(34:53):
for one thing, but it ends up getting partially abandoned
and re used for something else, And it can get
it can get messy, it can get complicated. 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

(35:15):
between rival theories. So I just want to make sure
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 has not found

(35:36):
a single case where Okam's razor was the decisive factor.
And 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 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

(35:56):
thought his take on this was really interesting because I
I had been taken in. I think I had previously thought, well,
maybe a really good case of Akham'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

(36:18):
debate of the time Ball points out that in reality,
So you know, we talked about one of the big
things being all these epicycles that in the ptolemic model,
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

(36:40):
back and forth and stuff. Um so, so he says,
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

(37:02):
bodies being elliptical rather than circular. So because he lacked
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 he cheated.

(37:24):
He put all these loops in there to make the
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

(37:48):
in support of his model. For example, quote uh, in
his main work on the heliocentric theory, De revolutiontionibus, I'm
gonna have trouble with this one day revolutiontionibus orbium 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. That

(38:11):
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

(38:33):
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.

(38:54):
This is a situation rarely, if ever, encountered in science.
Much more often theories are distinguish 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

(39:14):
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, the the whole

(39:34):
aquatic ape 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 it might seem

(39:57):
obvious one way or another, which one seems simple, alert
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

(40:18):
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 regarding the basic religious argument. Like if you're coming
from a really religious background where we've had this um this,

(40:42):
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 far of there had so
many epicycles in your your your your atheism, where my
my face is just a clear and straightforward as a whistle.
I mean people did actually argue that way. They'd say,

(41:04):
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 moper sticker thing, like, uh, what God, God wrote it,
I believe it in the story three steps that theory, Yeah,
it is a simplicity is often in the eye of
the beholder, like you don't have I mean, there are

(41:25):
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
of fuzzy qualitative judgments. What what seems like less of
an assumption to you. You lack an objective measure, people

(41:48):
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 Okham's razor,
It's basically like, if you have two theories that are
competing to explain the same things, they make all the
same predictions and explain it equally well. Yeah, they explain

(42:08):
that they make the same predictions explain things equally well.
But one of them has more assumptions, you go with
the one with fewer assumptions. But Ball argues that you
almost never, in reality get cases where the predictions of
two theories are exactly the same. Instead quote, scientific models
that differ in their assumptions typically make slightly different predictions too.

(42:30):
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 judge them on how good their predictions are. Uh. Finally,
he writes that he can only think of one real

(42:51):
instance in UH, in science where there are rival theories
that make exactly the same predictions on the basis of
quote easily in new morable and comparable assumptions. And this
one example he can think of is the different interpretations
of quantum mechanics, which I think is a fantastic example,
and that did not come to my mind, but I

(43:11):
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, but there's a problem. They

(43:31):
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 our experience of reality. So

(43:52):
that's where the interpretations of quantum mechanics come in. There
they're trying to reconcile this difference, explaining why the indeterministic,
hobbabilistic 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 of in a state of

(44:14):
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 many 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 different possible outcomes of

(44:37):
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 one of them is correct,
the outcomes of our experiments will be exactly the s aim,

(45:00):
so there's no way to test which one is right. Though,
And in a funny turn, Ball points out that Ockham'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 quantum theorist role in omnus quote,
as far as economy of thought is concerned, there never

(45:22):
was anything in the history of thought so bluntly contrary
to Ockham's rule than ever it's many worlds. On the
other hand, you've got a modern physicist like Sean Carroll
of of Caltech who advocates the many world's interpretation, specifically
because he argues it's the simplest interpretation of quantum theory.
He says, it doesn't make any additional assumptions. It's the

(45:44):
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 World's interpretation has been and you did, at
least casually so often, then in a way it feels

(46:04):
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 to be real,
but on on some like level, it's still kind of good.
Gets into you, it still affects you. I agree. I

(46:25):
mean again, I think this is this is pointing out
some of the weaknesses and how Alcam'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

(46:48):
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. Yes,
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.

(47:10):
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, read it, and

(47:32):
help 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

(47:54):
reality better. They're just easier to get your head around
and test. All right, on that note, we're gonna take
one more break, but we will be right back with
further discussion of the razor. 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

(48:15):
Simpler Better? 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 Akham's razor. Uh.
So he starts off, I think this is kind of
interesting talking about simplicity and complexity and art. Could you

(48:39):
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

(48:59):
year is back. 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 overstate it's welcome,
you know, and and and it just became kind of,

(49:20):
at least to me anyway, kind of kind of irritating
to even look at. You're like, no, I don't 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. Yeah, 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,

(49:40):
there's like a bunch of people on the poster and
things happening. Yeah, or that it's just kind of like
a geometric explosion of things, you know. Uh so, yeah,
you so 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 it's
very very tight and neat and minimalists. Maybe it's even

(50:02):
like a musical argument. Yeah, I love like minimalist ambient recordings,
but 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,

(50:24):
but then I also like, uh, you know, I love
I don't know, I don't, I don't know that it
gets 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

(50:44):
one thing. That's the world of human creation. Um. And
sometimes those creations are are made, uh to mimic nature,
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

(51:05):
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,
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

(51:27):
in the world. Some pasta scientific thinkers have tried to
come up with reasons why. Yeah, it's like simplicity is
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 and talking about why he
prefers simpler theories, wrote quote to choose those constructions which,

(51:49):
without straining, reduced things to the greatest simplicity. Uh. The
reason of this is that truth is ever to be
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

(52:11):
must endeavor to reduce their knowledge to all possible simplicity.
So it must be in seeking to understand these visions.
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,
had to fall back on the idea that we have
a lawful, good God as opposed to a chaotic good God. Right,

(52:32):
I mean, it would only be a bad God that
would allow more complex explanations to be correct. And so
were actually says there are some cases today, uh 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

(52:53):
that in these cases there there are times where you
can show simpler is actually better. Uh. He argues, there
reparadigms in which Occam's razor holds true, 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

(53:14):
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 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 either conceivably be somebody in

(53:37):
a RoboCup cost him, but the chances of that are
pretty slimp. I mean, unless you like are in a
RoboCop factory or something. It's going to be 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

(53:59):
be correct 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, like, what
what is more more likely though that it's someone that
the individual new, 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,

(54:22):
it's going to remain a zebra. Now a unicorn, but
a zebra exactly unless you have independent evidence pointing to
that as a superior hypothesis. There's no reason to go
to a rare phenomenon that would explain things equally. Well, 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

(54:42):
get into some cognitive biases from Yeah, the availability heuristic
kicks in But of course, another question is, like, 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 comm But
but so Sober says that you've got this concept he

(55:04):
calls the razor of silence, and and the basic explanation
of this is that if you've got evidence that A
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

(55:25):
about earlier, Like, if you've got an explanation that already
explains everything, there is no justification for adding additional explanations
on top of it. That you don't need to add
the angels pushing the planets right, 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

(55:47):
one cause of death on somebody, you don't need to
assume extra causes of death stacking on top of it
without direct evidence of them as well. So if you
find like a you know, a body, I don't know,
a body 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. King unless you know, you

(56:09):
do blood talks and then it comes back with poison.
You can't assume it then. But there's no reason to
start stacking on additional assumptions. Now there's another way that
sober says sometimes OCAM'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

(56:31):
gives this great example. Suppose all the lights on your
street go out. You could have two 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,

(56:56):
Like either either 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, just based on

(57:19):
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 genetic code. Now

(57:42):
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 light bulb failures. So a serial killer

(58:03):
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 person. 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 off hand

(58:24):
and from silence to 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
the salad bar. Another 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
could have sort of independent explanations for why each of

(58:44):
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 coincidence. Yes, 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? They

(59:06):
make accurate predictions about things we don't know yet. They
either accurately predict future measurements or outcomes or discoveries. Does
acams Raiser have anything to say here? Sober says yes,
Sometimes simplicity affects our best guesses about how accurate a
new theory will be, and he cites the work of
a Japanese statistician named Hiratuga Akayiki, who did important work

(59:28):
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,

(59:51):
and then how simple it is Simpler models are better. Uh.
Simplicity is evaluated by quote the number of adjustable parameters
and having few or 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

(01:00:12):
of this, 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 is not a fact about individual cases

(01:00:35):
on the ground. Now, he concludes by saying that these
three paradigms have something uh 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 in forming judgments about what the world is like,

(01:00:58):
there is, in the end no un conditional and presupposition
less justification for Ockham's razor. Uh 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,

(01:01:18):
and the real difficulty is 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 skeptics tool chest. And the thing about
a tool chest is that you have more than one

(01:01:40):
tool in there. And 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

(01:02:01):
the screwdriver. 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, there there,
there's I'm sorry, there's not just like an easy rule

(01:02:24):
of thumb for when they 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 seven eight bit computer game based on

(01:02:47):
the 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 uh they in fact, I read that
they didn't even hear back from Echo. They tried to
get a hut of them and they couldn't get hold
of it. And try to imagine the umberto Echo essay

(01:03:07):
about this video game when he tries to play it,
that would be good. Um, 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

(01:03:29):
I thought that was pretty much the into 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. Um,
the Abbey of the Crime Extensive, which you can get

(01:03:51):
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 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 Rose, Like it's a little Sean Connery and Christians Later. Yeah,

(01:04:14):
I don't know if they got permission to use their likenesses. Um,
how close. Does they 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 have 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 interested in, uh in what

(01:04:36):
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 Acam's razor

(01:04:57):
a an item that you can pick up like a
plus one occoms 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 Catholics. Yeah,
I cast the poverty of Christ on you. Well. In

(01:05:18):
the screenshot I was looking at, does look like the
main character Baskerville slash. ACoM does have a pair of spectacles,
but then there's like one to three there. There are
multiple empty spots here, So I guess he gets other stuff.
I mean, I guess various books and whatnot, some of
lemon juice. Uh, and probably some cheese, some cheese where

(01:05:39):
that gets like some fried cheese at some point, yeah,
I think so, but mostly books, mostly books. All right,
So there you have it, Acoms raisor hopefully we're able
to to lay it out for you, um, you know,
an explanation of what what alcomes 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

(01:06:00):
it back into the tool chest, and know a little
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 will shoot you over to the
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(01:06:21):
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These are the things that help us out huge thanks
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(01:06:49):
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