As usual, Facts and Logic types don’t understand their own worshiped ideas. Occam’s razor states that the idea with the least number of additional assumptions is most likely correct. Not “the simple explanation is always right.” as these people assert. And people are fucking awful at figuring out what “assumptions” even are in this context.
Also even if it was about “the simplest”, it’s NOT THE SIMPLEST EXPLANATION.
“Boeing killed a guy” - Boeing has already killed several guys (albeit by accident).
“Guy killed himself” - The guy had never before killed himself (as evidenced by him being alive until then)
He was also like 62 (so retired and unconcerned about future employment prospects?), seemingly healthy, and seemingly pretty content with everything other than Boeing, so…
Also note that it’s not an inviolable law. It doesn’t actually prove any particular position. It’s just a principle to guide your thinking and nothing more.
Say your car breaks down. The idea that it’s a mechanical failure is more Occam-friendly than the idea that your car was sabotaged which then caused the mechanical failure which caused your car to break down.
Note that as we add in that additional assumption, we reduce the likelihood of the second idea being true compared to the first idea. That’s just a function of adding assumptions. You could add an assumption that a person who had been threatening you was the person who sabotaged your car and it becomes less likely again, all things being equal.
All that this illustrates is that the more specific something is, the less generally applicable it is. Astonishing, right?
One of my favourite ways to really stump these dorks is by asking them which assertion is true according to Occam’s razor (itself false due to my point above and putting it in these terms is a low-key flex because a person who knows what they’re talking about would object to the framing of the assertion but that forever seems to be lost on these fools):
That God created the universe
The sum total of all of astrophysics, with every single claim therein, is how the universe was created
Obviously the simplest argument is always inherently the truest and most accurate argument every time, right?
You can drag the conversation down into the weeds by defending the first argument since it still makes fewer claims even when you add in extra points like the fact that god has always existed and is all powerful etc.; there’s basically no way of arguing that the explanation that astrophysics provides us for how the universe was created is simpler than the argument that God did it.
Of course this type of person is most likely to be an atheist edgelord, or at least a reformed edgelord, so this sort of argument is very likely to rile them up. And of course you can cut through this argument by stating that the number of assumptions that astrophysics makes is fewer but, again, that requires the other person to know what they’re talking about.
No, thank you, you put it far better than I did. I thought about bringing up the God argument (as I think that was one of the guy’s original points with this idea) but forgot. Like any logic tool, someone trying to use this argument to “win” a debate has already lost, the use of these sorts of tools is always to examine and refine your own arguments and own understanding of something, not to “win debates” with a gotcha.
Hey I’m not super strong on rhetorics and I’m kinda curious about the flaw in your argument. Would you mind explaining what the issue with your “god made the earth, or all of astrophysics did” supposition is?
Is it just that there’s a lot of hidden assumptions in the god bit and a lot of proven assumptions in the astrophysics bit?
My least favorite thing about these :smuglord: types is their constant misuse of language. I honestly don’t really mind busting out the ol logical falicies and shit but for the love of god use it correctly.
And when you confront them on their misuse of a word they just say some bullshit like “umm acktually the definitions of words change over time, so it’s really your fault for sticking to a standard definition of the word instead of using mine.”
Saw someone post the dictionary definition of “anarchy” after being told that anarchists weren’t just anti-government every man for themselves types. “The dictionary says it is, so I can just ignore political theory”
I am open and honestly interested in finding out more. I’m reading about Occam for the first time.
Would you like to say a little more about what assumptions are in this context? Sources on Occam that explain the idea sufficiently well would also be good.
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.
The assumptions being made about him killing himself are vast. First you have to assume he had some serious mental health crisis without evidence, or that some other dark secret was about to be revealed about him, or any number of other assumptions without evidence as to why he might have been motivated to take his own life.
Therefore the least amount of assumptions one could make was the obvious: He was murdered to silence him while he was a key witness against a multi-billion dollar corporation trying to get out of being held responsible for the deaths of other people they already killed.
An assumption would be a supposition that something, which isn’t directly proven by the known facts, happened and led to the event you’re trying to explain. Example: fire starts outside your house in drought season. Possible explanation #1: someone threw a glass bottle which caused a fire to start in the dry grass. Explanation #2: Your neighbor had a grudge against you and doused the grass with gasoline to do arson.
The first explanation makes one assumption: we don’t know if someone did litter or not, it’s not an unreasonable thing to guess but it’s also not directly related to the facts we already know. The second explanation makes several assumptions: That our neighbor had a grudge, that said grudge drove them to use gasoline specifically to douse the grass and burn it. These things may be true, but none of the facts relevant to the situation directly prove either of the assumptions.
As usual, Facts and Logic types don’t understand their own worshiped ideas. Occam’s razor states that the idea with the least number of additional assumptions is most likely correct. Not “the simple explanation is always right.” as these people assert. And people are fucking awful at figuring out what “assumptions” even are in this context.
Also even if it was about “the simplest”, it’s NOT THE SIMPLEST EXPLANATION.
“Boeing killed a guy” - Boeing has already killed several guys (albeit by accident).
“Guy killed himself” - The guy had never before killed himself (as evidenced by him being alive until then)
He was also like 62 (so retired and unconcerned about future employment prospects?), seemingly healthy, and seemingly pretty content with everything other than Boeing, so…
bayes theorem stay winning
There’s an xkcd for everything
Thank. You.
Also note that it’s not an inviolable law. It doesn’t actually prove any particular position. It’s just a principle to guide your thinking and nothing more.
Say your car breaks down. The idea that it’s a mechanical failure is more Occam-friendly than the idea that your car was sabotaged which then caused the mechanical failure which caused your car to break down.
Note that as we add in that additional assumption, we reduce the likelihood of the second idea being true compared to the first idea. That’s just a function of adding assumptions. You could add an assumption that a person who had been threatening you was the person who sabotaged your car and it becomes less likely again, all things being equal.
All that this illustrates is that the more specific something is, the less generally applicable it is. Astonishing, right?
One of my favourite ways to really stump these dorks is by asking them which assertion is true according to Occam’s razor (itself false due to my point above and putting it in these terms is a low-key flex because a person who knows what they’re talking about would object to the framing of the assertion but that forever seems to be lost on these fools):
That God created the universe
The sum total of all of astrophysics, with every single claim therein, is how the universe was created
Obviously the simplest argument is always inherently the truest and most accurate argument every time, right?
You can drag the conversation down into the weeds by defending the first argument since it still makes fewer claims even when you add in extra points like the fact that god has always existed and is all powerful etc.; there’s basically no way of arguing that the explanation that astrophysics provides us for how the universe was created is simpler than the argument that God did it.
Of course this type of person is most likely to be an atheist edgelord, or at least a reformed edgelord, so this sort of argument is very likely to rile them up. And of course you can cut through this argument by stating that the number of assumptions that astrophysics makes is fewer but, again, that requires the other person to know what they’re talking about.
No, thank you, you put it far better than I did. I thought about bringing up the God argument (as I think that was one of the guy’s original points with this idea) but forgot. Like any logic tool, someone trying to use this argument to “win” a debate has already lost, the use of these sorts of tools is always to examine and refine your own arguments and own understanding of something, not to “win debates” with a gotcha.
Hey I’m not super strong on rhetorics and I’m kinda curious about the flaw in your argument. Would you mind explaining what the issue with your “god made the earth, or all of astrophysics did” supposition is?
Is it just that there’s a lot of hidden assumptions in the god bit and a lot of proven assumptions in the astrophysics bit?
I think “God did it” is a straight up simpler explanation no matter how you slice it. The problem is with the incorrect application of Occam’s razor.
My least favorite thing about these :smuglord: types is their constant misuse of language. I honestly don’t really mind busting out the ol logical falicies and shit but for the love of god use it correctly.
And when you confront them on their misuse of a word they just say some bullshit like “umm acktually the definitions of words change over time, so it’s really your fault for sticking to a standard definition of the word instead of using mine.”
Yup. “this is how I, and everyone I have ever known use the word. Also here’s a dictionary defining it that way”
“language perspectivist much :smuglord:”
Saw someone post the dictionary definition of “anarchy” after being told that anarchists weren’t just anti-government every man for themselves types. “The dictionary says it is, so I can just ignore political theory”
A classic is when they bust out “ad hominem” after being called an idiot.
AN INSULT IS NOT WHAT AN AD HOMINEM IS YOU BUFFOONS
Insult: you suck
Ad Hominem: you suck, therefore you’re wrong
https://redsails.org/the-ad-hominem-fallacy-fallacy/
I am open and honestly interested in finding out more. I’m reading about Occam for the first time.
Would you like to say a little more about what assumptions are in this context? Sources on Occam that explain the idea sufficiently well would also be good.
Thanks in advance!
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!
Basically what Egon said below.
The assumptions being made about him killing himself are vast. First you have to assume he had some serious mental health crisis without evidence, or that some other dark secret was about to be revealed about him, or any number of other assumptions without evidence as to why he might have been motivated to take his own life.
Therefore the least amount of assumptions one could make was the obvious: He was murdered to silence him while he was a key witness against a multi-billion dollar corporation trying to get out of being held responsible for the deaths of other people they already killed.
I think they mean “assumptions” in general - like what is defined as being an “assumption” wrt Occam’s razor?
An assumption would be a supposition that something, which isn’t directly proven by the known facts, happened and led to the event you’re trying to explain. Example: fire starts outside your house in drought season. Possible explanation #1: someone threw a glass bottle which caused a fire to start in the dry grass. Explanation #2: Your neighbor had a grudge against you and doused the grass with gasoline to do arson.
The first explanation makes one assumption: we don’t know if someone did litter or not, it’s not an unreasonable thing to guess but it’s also not directly related to the facts we already know. The second explanation makes several assumptions: That our neighbor had a grudge, that said grudge drove them to use gasoline specifically to douse the grass and burn it. These things may be true, but none of the facts relevant to the situation directly prove either of the assumptions.
Exactly. What he said was: ‘pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate’, “plurality should not be posited without necessity.”
Sometimes, there’s pretty damn obvious necessity.
I was thinking the same thing.
The wild “TAKE” here is that person’s interpretation of how to apply Occam’s Razor.