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.
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.