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troperville

You know, deleting Caroline has taught me a valuable lesson. The best solution to a problem is usually the easiest one. And I'll be honest- killing you? Is hard.

— GLaDOS, Portal 2

Also called:

Law of parsimony
Law of economy
Law of succinctness
The Lex Parsimoniae

Occam's Razor is a logical principle first described in the 14th century by William of Ockham

, an English Franciscan friar and philosopher. It is often used to evaluate the usefulness of a theory. Its main tenet is that "Entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity." It can be summed up with the phrase "When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras."

Most theories have a foundation of underlying premises (the aforementioned "entities"), all of which need to be true for the theory itself to be true. Occam's Razor suggests believing the theory with the fewest underlying premises (the aforementioned "not multiplied beyond necessity").

Example: There have been theories that Ancient Astronauts built the Egyptian Pyramids instead of humans. For this to be true, we'd need the following givens:

aliens exist^note
they have some form of interstellar travel^note
they know how to find us^note,
there is absolutely no other evidence to their existence other than the pyramids^note some, however, would dispute this ,
they would be able to both work stone and leave fake proof that fools entire civilizations, and
once they got here, they'd waste time building huge stone things in a desert instead of, you know, actually showing themselves.

The more normal theory only requires that:

humans exist^note, and
said humans would waste time building huge stone things in a desert^note.

You can probably guess which theory Occam would agree with, and why.

In short, when trying to examine an incident to figure out why it happened, a simple answer involving the commonplace and reasonable is more likely to be correct. Note: more likely, not always likely. For decades, doctors presumed that people got stomach ulcers because of stress and bad diet, which was more likely to be the case, and thus encouraging people to reduce the conditions that caused them to be exposed to stress, and to eat a bland diet, were reasonable treatments for people with stomach ulcers, until it was discovered that viruses were the true cause of most stomach ulcers, meaning stress and diet had absolutely nothing to do with whether or not you got a stomach ulcer.

Occam's Razor is the bane of Conspiracy Theorists everywhere for the same reason: take a look at the Apollo moon landings, which a good percentage, in the single figures, believe was hoaxed. Often people will find "evidence" that the landings could never have taken place, but it rests on the arguments that the US government:

were willing to throw billions away for smoke-and-mirrors attempts,
were smart enough to fool 99% of the population (which some would contest),
were simultaneously stupid enough not to cover their tracks,
had the technological and film-making ability to actually fake the moon-landing footage^note
were able to pay off and swear to silence thousands of people working at NASA and other companies for forty years when they couldn't even pull off a simple burglary, and
were actively collaborating with the Soviets during a period of history where relations were historically edgy and were given consent by Moscow to win this symbolic victory. Alternatively, the Soviets (who were monitoring all of our launch activities and radio transmissions) declined to call shenanigans on the whole thing.

After that, you'd think that the simplest explanation was to, you know, actually send people there (That Mitchell and Webb Look has a brilliant series of sketches on this idea, including the moon landing

The Razor is commonly misinterpreted as saying, "The simplest theory is the best." This is not correct in Real Life unless it is the simpler of two theories which make predictions with identical degrees of accuracy. All other aspects of the theory have to be equal before simplicity is taken into account. It also requires that all the data is accounted for. Newtonian physics are simpler than modern theories and were sufficient to take man to the Moon, but (with all due respect to the man) Sir Isaac simply could not explain all the data eventually collected—especially since a lot of the offending material had not been collected when Principia Mathematica was published. This required some other smart man—namely, Albert Einstein—to formulate more complex theories, particularly the outrageous stew we call "Relativity" which functions along completely different rules. Now, Occam's Razor would suggest that there must be some Grand Unified Theory that explains why physics work one way on an atomic level and completely differently on a larger-than-atomic level. Much of the last century of scientific research (including Einstein's) has centered around trying to come up with one. They haven't succeeded. So far, Occam's Razor is wrong, and the universe simply functions according to completely different sets of rules depending on an object's physical size, for no good reason whatsoever. Nobody likes this, but in the end, nothing says that an explanation must be simple.

Another very common mistake is to summon up the Razor in a debate over a point that is entirely moot in order to add weight to a particular argument. This usage is entirely fallacious as the Razor does nothing more than recommend the hypothesis that makes the fewest new assumptions. It is not a magical tool that points to the right answer. In a lab it will be used hundreds or thousands of times, with each and every one of the chosen hypothesis being rigorously tested, before a correct answer is found. In a debate the Razor will be used once and will, invariably, choose the user's answer as the 'right' one. Funny, that. Another problem thrown up in such situations is the scramble to determine whose theory is simplest and thus which one "benefits" from the application of the Razor. For instance, in the perennial arguments about the existence of God, the theists claim that the universe is so complex that for it to have come into existence without God is more unlikely than the atheist position: that a being so powerful as to create, maintain, and meddle in something as complex as the universe would Himself have to be even more complex, especially if He inhabits an unknowable supernatural dimension. Reams of books have been written on such questions.

And always remember that Occam's Razor is a guideline, not a rule. Be careful of facts that are subjective in nature or may not be fully established.

The inverse of this is Arkham's Razor, where the most bizarre solution is most likely to be the correct one.

No Transhumanism Allowed

Laws and Formulas

Offscreen Inertia

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