I’m afraid I don’t have anything on hand, so here’s a brief bit of stuff from memory (so it could be quite wrong), “William of Occam” was a 13th century monk who was interested in the sciences and came up with this idea. So it is a very simple pre-modern idea of eliminating unnecessary “fluff” when trying to determine something. At the time there wasn’t a properly developed scientific method, so this idea could be considered a sort of proto-scientific method, an attempt to examine things and then understand them, instead of having a conclusion and working backwards to support it.
Occam’s razor is usually used as a kind of lazy intellectual shorthand to justify an idea because it is straightforward, though they will usually use the term “simple” when they mean “straightforward.” but an idea being “simple” isn’t the same thing as an idea with fewer underlying assumptions.
For a basic thought experiment, consider a very simple idea: A butterfly is on a flower.
The “simplest” idea of anything would be that it just is because it is. The butterfly is on the flower because that’s where the butterfly is. But this isn’t an explanation of anything. It is “simple” but saying “the thing is they way it is because it is.” isn’t actually a satisfying explanation to anyone.
We could assert that the butterfly is on the flower because Google’s stock price just increased, but this is an additional assumption, as it would assume the butterfly has knowledge of the stock market and that knowledge influences its decision to sit on flowers somehow. This explanation is a explanation, but it makes some very big assumptions about how butterflies operate.
So the key to understanding this sort of logic is to collate the information we know about the situation. In this case, it would be what we know about butterflies. If we know that butterflies drink nectar, we have an explanation that fits occam’s razor well. The butterfly is hungry, that’s why it is on the flower. No additional mechanisms required to explain the behaviour, no extra assumptions.
Of course, this explanation still requires us to understand something about butterflies, so occam’s razor as a tool is only really useful in situations where we already understand a decent amount already, and is really only useful for eliminating really over the top explanations. It’s more of a starting point of an investigation, never an end point, and never a debatebro trump card “haha I play occam’s razor, which means I win the debate!” thing that the internet has turned it into.
Sorry for the ramble. TLDR: Made up by a guy like 700 years ago and not super relevant today, except in very broad strokes.
Thank you for this writeup. I’m gonna bookmark it and spam it at every dumbass who uses Occam’s razor from now on. Your butterfly example is a great explanation of my frustration with how the concept is used in modern day
Just want to add that people who invoke Occam’s razor almost always rely on this to conceal a normative argument in order to defend the default position.
As an example, people generally presume that capitalism is meritocratic right?
If you make an case for why this is not true a person like the one in the screenshot might start tutting and wagging their finger at you while chiding you about Occam’s razor because your argument is more “complex”, or something to that effect, and thus that it is wrong.
Don’t ever let them do that.
Just because you are refuting something which is held as truth according to conventional wisdom doesn’t mean that it has fewer assumptions. It’s just that those assumptions are generally accepted as true by the majority of people and therefore feels like those assumptions don’t count.
Yeah that’s also one of the reasons I hate seeing it invoked. It’s always done by some status quo dickhead. There’s that one and then the one about “not attributing to malice what can be explained by incompetence.” I’ve seen both invoked to defend the bombing of civilians more than once.
Honestly, the malice/incompetence thing is pretty okay to operate with on a personal level just like “Distrust those in whom the urge to punish is strong” is but if you’re dealing with a judge or, say, people who are seeking to prosecute former Nazi party members then they’re going to display the urge to punish strongly and it shows how insufficient it is to base your politics on an adage.
I’ve had a massive rant to a comrade some time ago about how it’s a feature not a bug that almost all of the ways that we, the unwashed masses, experience our interface with the government as being slow, inefficient, and incompetent; I believe that this is a conceit of liberal democracy in late stage capitalism - if everyone’s experience of the government is one characterised by incompetence then we struggle to even conceive of a government that is responsive and responsible, and this conceals the true nature of the governments that we live under in the west. But fail to pay your taxes or start researching and buying material to make improvised… devices, for example, you get to witness the other face of the government - one which is ruthlessly efficient and extremely capable of achieving its ends.
At some point your suspension of disbelief has to wear thin when yet-another supply of weapons from the US just so happens to end up in the hands of ISIS or yet-another MSF or Al-Jazeera building gets struck by US munitions. In the serious end of government, the wheels are greased with shit like plausible deniability, feigned incompetence, and post-facto internal investigations/admissions of culpability.
I’m afraid I don’t have anything on hand, so here’s a brief bit of stuff from memory (so it could be quite wrong), “William of Occam” was a 13th century monk who was interested in the sciences and came up with this idea. So it is a very simple pre-modern idea of eliminating unnecessary “fluff” when trying to determine something. At the time there wasn’t a properly developed scientific method, so this idea could be considered a sort of proto-scientific method, an attempt to examine things and then understand them, instead of having a conclusion and working backwards to support it.
Occam’s razor is usually used as a kind of lazy intellectual shorthand to justify an idea because it is straightforward, though they will usually use the term “simple” when they mean “straightforward.” but an idea being “simple” isn’t the same thing as an idea with fewer underlying assumptions.
For a basic thought experiment, consider a very simple idea: A butterfly is on a flower.
The “simplest” idea of anything would be that it just is because it is. The butterfly is on the flower because that’s where the butterfly is. But this isn’t an explanation of anything. It is “simple” but saying “the thing is they way it is because it is.” isn’t actually a satisfying explanation to anyone.
We could assert that the butterfly is on the flower because Google’s stock price just increased, but this is an additional assumption, as it would assume the butterfly has knowledge of the stock market and that knowledge influences its decision to sit on flowers somehow. This explanation is a explanation, but it makes some very big assumptions about how butterflies operate.
So the key to understanding this sort of logic is to collate the information we know about the situation. In this case, it would be what we know about butterflies. If we know that butterflies drink nectar, we have an explanation that fits occam’s razor well. The butterfly is hungry, that’s why it is on the flower. No additional mechanisms required to explain the behaviour, no extra assumptions.
Of course, this explanation still requires us to understand something about butterflies, so occam’s razor as a tool is only really useful in situations where we already understand a decent amount already, and is really only useful for eliminating really over the top explanations. It’s more of a starting point of an investigation, never an end point, and never a debatebro trump card “haha I play occam’s razor, which means I win the debate!” thing that the internet has turned it into.
Sorry for the ramble. TLDR: Made up by a guy like 700 years ago and not super relevant today, except in very broad strokes.
Thank you for this writeup. I’m gonna bookmark it and spam it at every dumbass who uses Occam’s razor from now on. Your butterfly example is a great explanation of my frustration with how the concept is used in modern day
Just want to add that people who invoke Occam’s razor almost always rely on this to conceal a normative argument in order to defend the default position.
As an example, people generally presume that capitalism is meritocratic right?
If you make an case for why this is not true a person like the one in the screenshot might start tutting and wagging their finger at you while chiding you about Occam’s razor because your argument is more “complex”, or something to that effect, and thus that it is wrong.
Don’t ever let them do that.
Just because you are refuting something which is held as truth according to conventional wisdom doesn’t mean that it has fewer assumptions. It’s just that those assumptions are generally accepted as true by the majority of people and therefore feels like those assumptions don’t count.
Yeah that’s also one of the reasons I hate seeing it invoked. It’s always done by some status quo dickhead. There’s that one and then the one about “not attributing to malice what can be explained by incompetence.” I’ve seen both invoked to defend the bombing of civilians more than once.
Agreed.
Honestly, the malice/incompetence thing is pretty okay to operate with on a personal level just like “Distrust those in whom the urge to punish is strong” is but if you’re dealing with a judge or, say, people who are seeking to prosecute former Nazi party members then they’re going to display the urge to punish strongly and it shows how insufficient it is to base your politics on an adage.
I’ve had a massive rant to a comrade some time ago about how it’s a feature not a bug that almost all of the ways that we, the unwashed masses, experience our interface with the government as being slow, inefficient, and incompetent; I believe that this is a conceit of liberal democracy in late stage capitalism - if everyone’s experience of the government is one characterised by incompetence then we struggle to even conceive of a government that is responsive and responsible, and this conceals the true nature of the governments that we live under in the west. But fail to pay your taxes or start researching and buying material to make improvised… devices, for example, you get to witness the other face of the government - one which is ruthlessly efficient and extremely capable of achieving its ends.
At some point your suspension of disbelief has to wear thin when yet-another supply of weapons from the US just so happens to end up in the hands of ISIS or yet-another MSF or Al-Jazeera building gets struck by US munitions. In the serious end of government, the wheels are greased with shit like plausible deniability, feigned incompetence, and post-facto internal investigations/admissions of culpability.
Thank you for taking the time to explain!