Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
Speaker 1: is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday.
Speaker 1: Time to go into the vault for a classic episode
Speaker 1: of the show. This one originally published on February and
Speaker 1: it's about Acam's Razor. Yeah, this one, this one is
Speaker 1: a lot of fun we get into. You know, we
Speaker 1: discussed scientific thinking and speculative thinking. Uh, we discussed the
Speaker 1: name of the rose a little bit for obvious reasons
Speaker 1: that this one was fun. There's some some history, some science.
Speaker 1: Everything you want. Dr wonderful. Welcome to Stuff to Blow
Speaker 1: your Mind, a production of I Heart Radios How Stuff Work. Hey,
Speaker 1: welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is
Speaker 1: Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And today we're going
Speaker 1: to discuss a problem solving principles that many of you
Speaker 1: have probably heard of and that we've we've definitely referenced
Speaker 1: on the show before, and that is Acom's Razor. That's right,
Speaker 1: it's it's one of the classics, one of the hits
Speaker 1: of like the Skeptical tool Kit, and uh, I think
Speaker 1: it's a really good one to get into because it's
Speaker 1: something that is widely known, but in different ways and
Speaker 1: often uh. To whatever extent it actually does have value,
Speaker 1: it often gets deployed in ways that do not actually
Speaker 1: make use of its value, right, Like like an actual
Speaker 1: razor blade may be misused from time to time. Now,
Speaker 1: one specific place that I know we've talked about it
Speaker 1: before is that is in the context of Carl Sagan's
Speaker 1: recommendations for the tools of skeptical thinking. Uh. He lays
Speaker 1: these out, and one of them is Occam's razor. He writes,
Speaker 1: Occam's razor. This convenient rule of thumb urges us, when
Speaker 1: faced with two hypotheses that explain the data equally well,
Speaker 1: to choose the simpler. Okay, Now, why do we end
Speaker 1: up talking about this today. We were in the studio
Speaker 1: the other day, uh, discussing upcoming episodes, and you said
Speaker 1: that Seth mentioned this, our our producer, Seth. Yeah. I
Speaker 1: was in here and Seth Nicholas Johnson was working on
Speaker 1: a crossword puzzle. Was it the New York Times? He
Speaker 1: tells us it was The New York Times? Uh, And
Speaker 1: he he asked me how to spell okam is an
Speaker 1: Ockham's razor? And I took a guess. At it and
Speaker 1: I can't. I can't remember I was correct. I was
Speaker 1: probably wrong, but also probably hit one of the multiple
Speaker 1: acceptable spellings for Ockhams raiser um. But anyway, we started
Speaker 1: talking about it and I was like, oh, yeah, we
Speaker 1: could do that as an episode, and so here we are.
Speaker 1: I'm very glad we picked this because I think one
Speaker 1: of my personal favorite genres of critical thinking is is
Speaker 1: being skeptical about the tools of skepticism. You know, is
Speaker 1: sometimes people who identify as skeptics can can I get
Speaker 1: a little cocky? You know, they get a little too
Speaker 1: sure of themselves about what the reasoning tools they use,
Speaker 1: and it's worth putting those tools to the test, giving
Speaker 1: them a closer look. Yeah. Absolutely, Now I have to
Speaker 1: say that I definitely remember the first time I encountered
Speaker 1: the concept of Ockham's raz or, at least the first
Speaker 1: time I encounter unded it, and it on some level
Speaker 1: stuck with me. And that was when I view the
Speaker 1: film adaptation of Carl Sagan's novel Contact. The movie I
Speaker 1: can't watch without crying. Oh yeah, yeah, well why does
Speaker 1: it make you cry? Oh God, there's no no, It's
Speaker 1: just it's pointed, like especially the first part where you know,
Speaker 1: it zooms out from the earth and you're hearing the
Speaker 1: radio signals go back in time, and then and then
Speaker 1: it shows the young Ellie air Away experimenting with the
Speaker 1: ham radio and her dad's helping her, and I get
Speaker 1: so emotional. I don't know, yeah, yeah, it's it's been
Speaker 1: a very long I haven't seen it since it initially
Speaker 1: came out, And in fact, the main thing I remember
Speaker 1: from it is this scene in which Jodie Foster's character
Speaker 1: Eleanor air Away has having this conversation with Matthew McConaughey's character.
Speaker 1: Who how old was Matthew McConaughey at this point, I
Speaker 1: don't even know how old he is now he's just
Speaker 1: like this ageless demon. But anyway, he has his character,
Speaker 1: he's playing his character named Palmer Joss. Uh huh. And
Speaker 1: in the scene in question, Foster's character brings up Acam's
Speaker 1: raiser in a discussion on the nature of God. She
Speaker 1: she says, well, which is ultimately the simpler hypothesis than
Speaker 1: an all powerful God exists or the human beings made
Speaker 1: God up in order to feel better about things, and
Speaker 1: then this ultimately comes back around is kind of flipped
Speaker 1: on her later on in the film regarding her characters
Speaker 1: encounter with an extraterrestrial intelligence. Right, is it more likely
Speaker 1: that she really had the experience she thinks she had
Speaker 1: with with all these aliens or that she like hallucinated
Speaker 1: something that would give her emotional closure. Yeah, and so yeah,
Speaker 1: I think I was in high school at the time,
Speaker 1: so it was It was an interesting concept, especially in
Speaker 1: the context of atheism versus you know, faith in a
Speaker 1: creator deity. Uh. To to suddenly have this tool from
Speaker 1: the chest of skeptical thinking just thrown up on the
Speaker 1: table and you and seemingly used by both sides. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: I think this is funny. This is a great example
Speaker 1: because it highlights some of the most common features of
Speaker 1: Occam's razor as it is actually used, Like it's often
Speaker 1: invoked in a kind of fuzzy way, like without an
Speaker 1: objective measure, uh, just kind of invoked to back up
Speaker 1: your intuitions about the probability of something. Right. But another
Speaker 1: thing is that this example shows how it's not always
Speaker 1: easy to find a way to compare the simplicity of
Speaker 1: two different propositions, like is the existence of God a
Speaker 1: simple hypothesis or a complicated one that I think that
Speaker 1: really depends on kind of how you feel about it,
Speaker 1: like like what kind of objective measure can you come
Speaker 1: up with to evaluate that question? Right, It's going to
Speaker 1: depend so much on your like your background, your culture,
Speaker 1: what you grew up with, and just how you how
Speaker 1: you've come to view the possibility of of of God's existence.
Speaker 1: Is it just kind of the bedrock of your your
Speaker 1: worldview or is it this thing from the outside that
Speaker 1: you are contemplating. And also how do you view it,
Speaker 1: like the coherence of the idea. Do you view it
Speaker 1: as something that's like, uh, that's full of all these
Speaker 1: little kind of ad hoc accommodations, or something that is
Speaker 1: a holistic, coherent sort of like fact about nature, you know,
Speaker 1: it's I think this is a perfect example that shows
Speaker 1: like when people use the idea of Okham's razor in
Speaker 1: a way that is not helpful and doesn't really it
Speaker 1: doesn't really get you any closer to figuring out what's true.
Speaker 1: Now if you're one, If if you're still questioning like
Speaker 1: what the concept really means, don't worry. We will get
Speaker 1: to some I think some some very understandable examples of
Speaker 1: how it can be used properly and used improperly. But
Speaker 1: let's go ahead and to start about the concept itself
Speaker 1: the word acum uh. And you know where this comes from.
Speaker 1: We'll get to the origins of akamas razor. So Acam's
Speaker 1: razor is also known as the principle of parsimony, and
Speaker 1: parsimony means a tendency toward cheapness or frugality. So I
Speaker 1: like that. It's like the principle of parsimony is like,
Speaker 1: you want to be cheap with your with your logic, right, yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't need more than two steps of logic between
Speaker 1: me and the solution. Uh. You know, don't give me
Speaker 1: one with four or five uh. And it was named
Speaker 1: after the medieval English philosopher William of Ockham, of course,
Speaker 1: William of Ockom Uh. So he he lived in the
Speaker 1: thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, from twelve eighty five to either
Speaker 1: thirteen forty seven or thirteen forty nine. I've seen different
Speaker 1: death dates given for him. I've seen different birthdates as well.
Speaker 1: At twelve eighty seven or twelve eighty eight, That's what
Speaker 1: I was looking at. That's interesting. So he was a
Speaker 1: prolific scholar Franciscan friar. We'll get more into his ideas
Speaker 1: in a minute. You know, one thing I've always wondered
Speaker 1: is where the heck is Ocum. I've never heard of that. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: because the words sound it has kind of like a
Speaker 1: remoteness to it. It sounds alien in some ways. Akom
Speaker 1: is very much a real place. It is a rural
Speaker 1: village in Surrey, England. You can look it up online.
Speaker 1: You can find out the website for the church in Ocum,
Speaker 1: for example. And this area has been occupied since ancient times.
Speaker 1: It's about a day's ride south best of London, and
Speaker 1: it was the birthplace of the individual who had come
Speaker 1: to be known as William of Ockham. Now beyond that,
Speaker 1: beyond the fact that he was born here, we don't
Speaker 1: know a lot about William's life. Uh. We don't know
Speaker 1: what his social or family background was, or if his
Speaker 1: native language was French or Middle English. As Paul Vincent
Speaker 1: Spade explains in The Cambridge Companion to Ockham, he was
Speaker 1: likely given over to the Franciscan Order as a young
Speaker 1: boy before the age of fourteen, and here Latin would
Speaker 1: have quickly become his language of of of not only writing,
Speaker 1: but also just conversation. Gray Friar's convent in London was
Speaker 1: likely his home convent, but later he traveled. He visited Avignon,
Speaker 1: he visited Italy, and he lived the last two decades
Speaker 1: of his life in Germany. Now, philosophically, William was a nominalist,
Speaker 1: and Spade writes that the two main themes of this
Speaker 1: for William were the rejection of universals and ontological reduction.
Speaker 1: And these two themes are are not necessarily interconnected, like
Speaker 1: you can you could, you could believe in one but
Speaker 1: not the other, you know, and vice versa um. But
Speaker 1: basically let's let's get into what these means. So the first,
Speaker 1: the rejection of universals is perhaps best considered, and this
Speaker 1: is very brief and broad. Certainly you can find so
Speaker 1: much written and set on this topic, but basically, think
Speaker 1: of it as a rejection of the Platonic idea of
Speaker 1: the realm of forms. So that idea that all chairs
Speaker 1: that we might make, the whom I design and carve
Speaker 1: and a symbol are an attempt to create the perfect chair,
Speaker 1: which doesn't reside in our world, but only resides within
Speaker 1: this realm of forms. So all chairs that we create
Speaker 1: are like an aspiration for the ideal chair. Another way
Speaker 1: I've thought about it, at least as I understood it,
Speaker 1: was that nominalism is kind of the idea that there
Speaker 1: is no such thing as a chair. There's only this
Speaker 1: chair and that chair and this chair over here. There
Speaker 1: is no chair right like this. This is the kind
Speaker 1: of the situation one gets it too when you get
Speaker 1: into like the genre classifications of say albums, artists or
Speaker 1: movies that you care a great deal about, and someone
Speaker 1: tries to limit it to a classification and say, oh, well,
Speaker 1: that's classic rock or that's alternative rock, and you're like, no, no,
Speaker 1: no, no no, no, you don't. Don't try and fit that.
Speaker 1: There is there is. These categories do not apply. There
Speaker 1: is There is only you know, whatever your band of
Speaker 1: choice happens to be. That, there is only tool, There
Speaker 1: is only primus or whatever. Right there, Yeah, there there
Speaker 1: is only things, not categories. Now let's move on to
Speaker 1: the second theme here, ontological reduction. This is, as Britannica
Speaker 1: defines it, quote, the metaphysical doctrine that entities of a
Speaker 1: certain kind are, in reality collections or combinations of entities
Speaker 1: of simpler or more basic kind. I think your classic
Speaker 1: example here is molecules atoms. Yeah. So another example here's
Speaker 1: while our Aristotle defined ten categories of objects that might
Speaker 1: be apprehended by a human mind, and these would have
Speaker 1: been uh translations, very on on how you wanted to
Speaker 1: find these. But substance, quantity, quality, relative place, time, attitude, condition, action,
Speaker 1: and affection. William cut these down to two substance and quality.
Speaker 1: He's really getting in there. That's the razor. That's what
Speaker 1: a razor does. It just it slices away, It cuts
Speaker 1: off the fat and gets down to the meat. Spade writes, quote.
Speaker 1: Although these two strands of Acam's thinking are independent, they
Speaker 1: are nevertheless often viewed as joint effects of a more
Speaker 1: fundamental concern, the principle of parsimony, known as Acam's razor. Okay,
Speaker 1: so we're getting to the razor here. Yeah. So William
Speaker 1: devoted a lot of energy to arguing against what Spade
Speaker 1: calls the bloated ontological inventories of his contemporaries, and he
Speaker 1: became well known to his peers for this as such,
Speaker 1: either towards the end of his life or shortly after
Speaker 1: his death, a kind of Greatest Hits album came out
Speaker 1: on his Thoughts and Ideas titled on the Principles of Theology.
Speaker 1: Now it wasn't actually by William of Ockham, but it
Speaker 1: featured his doctrine as well as verbatim quotes. There was
Speaker 1: no ascribed author either, so later generations would often just
Speaker 1: attribute it to him um as well as the notion
Speaker 1: of Akham's razor. Uh. However, this specific phrase was apparently
Speaker 1: never actually used by him. He never said Ackham in
Speaker 1: the house, I'm going to get the razor out and
Speaker 1: start carving on some uh some some some some ideas here. No,
Speaker 1: this is something that is attributed by others to his work. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Okham's razor is a is a name for this principle
Speaker 1: that is supposed to be kind of a summation of
Speaker 1: several different thoughts he articulated in different ways. Yes, yeah,
Speaker 1: he summed it up in different different manners. Uh. In
Speaker 1: Spade includes includes a few examples of this in his work.
Speaker 1: For instance, here, here's some quotes from Akam. Beings are
Speaker 1: not to be multiplied beyond necessity or plurality, is not
Speaker 1: to be a positive without necessity or what can happen
Speaker 1: through fewer principles happens in Vain through more and there
Speaker 1: are other there are other examples of this as well.
Speaker 1: We're basically saying the same thing, but maybe like it
Speaker 1: just comes off a little flower at least in translations. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think the the simple version you could get to
Speaker 1: the summarizing some of his abuse here, like, uh, don't
Speaker 1: make assumptions you don't have to, don't pile on explanations
Speaker 1: that are not necessary. Yeah, and also just don't take
Speaker 1: more steps they are necessary to get from point A
Speaker 1: to point B than your reasoning and in your hypothesis.
Speaker 1: And the way this usually gets translated into modern thinking,
Speaker 1: as we've talked about before, is that when you've got
Speaker 1: competing explanations, it's better to tend towards the simpler one,
Speaker 1: the one that makes fewer assumptions, rather than the more
Speaker 1: complicated one that makes more assumptions. Now here's another fun
Speaker 1: fact about William of Aucham. William Ackom is key to
Speaker 1: Elmberto Echo's excellent novel The Name of the Rose. Uh.
Speaker 1: This was a novel that was published in nineteen eighty.
Speaker 1: Many of you may be familiar with the certainly the
Speaker 1: the film adaptation that starred Sean Connery, f Murray, Abraham Um,
Speaker 1: Christian Slater in a host of wonderful character actors. And
Speaker 1: then there was there's a more recent mini series adaptation
Speaker 1: with John Taturo that I have not seen, but I
Speaker 1: should probably see at some point or another. But anyway,
Speaker 1: the main character in Echoes novel is William of Baskerville,
Speaker 1: who is in many ways similar. He's a Franciscan friar.
Speaker 1: He's got a kind of empirical streak. Yeah, he's basically
Speaker 1: a mash up of William of Ockam and Sherlock Holmes,
Speaker 1: thus the Baskerville alluding to uh Hound of the Baskerville's.
Speaker 1: Then the title itself, the Name of the Rose, has
Speaker 1: has been interpreted as being a reference to Acom's uh nominalism.
Speaker 1: There is no one rose. There is only the Name
Speaker 1: of the Rose. But they're also other I think interpretations
Speaker 1: on it, and it's meant to be kind of cryptic.
Speaker 1: Now according to I was reading more about this, and
Speaker 1: it's been been a little while since I've read In
Speaker 1: the Name of the Rose, you've read it more recently
Speaker 1: than yes, Because we were misremembering. We were thinking, now
Speaker 1: was it was? Was it the case? In the book
Speaker 1: that William of Ockham was supposed to be this fictional
Speaker 1: main character's mentor. I somehow had that in my mind
Speaker 1: as well. No, instead it was another medieval scholastic thinker.
Speaker 1: It was Roger Bacon. So so yes, Roger Bacon was
Speaker 1: William of Baskerville's mentor, as opposed to William of Acham,
Speaker 1: who I do not believe as Ackam is actually mentioned
Speaker 1: in the novel. So I was reading a little bit
Speaker 1: more about this. There was a two thousand eighteen article
Speaker 1: that came out in Philosophy Now by Carol Nicholson titled
Speaker 1: Acam's Rose, and she pointed out that Echo had apparently
Speaker 1: explored the possibility of simply using Ackam as his main
Speaker 1: character in in this novel, but he ultimately quote did
Speaker 1: not find him a very attractive person. And therefore, I mean,
Speaker 1: did that makes sense right? If you're it's like, you
Speaker 1: can either lean on a historical figure, or he can
Speaker 1: do something a little more fun and do a mash
Speaker 1: up of ACoM and the Great Detective And ultimately, I mean,
Speaker 1: that's one of the fun things about the novel is
Speaker 1: that is that you do have these elements where it's
Speaker 1: a it's Sherlock Holmes going up against bores, you know,
Speaker 1: that kind of sort of thing. She writes, Uh, this
Speaker 1: is interesting as well, just to draw the parallel between
Speaker 1: William of Baskerville and William of of Olcom. She writes,
Speaker 1: quote in thirty seven, the year in which the name
Speaker 1: of the Roses set, ACoM faced fifty six charges of
Speaker 1: heresy and was excommunicated after escaping the protection of Emperor
Speaker 1: Louis of Bavaria. This put an end to his academic career,
Speaker 1: and he spent the rest of his life as a
Speaker 1: political activists, advocating freedom of speech, the separation of church
Speaker 1: and state, and arguing against the infallibility of the pope.
Speaker 1: She also points out that Ackom, like the fictional William
Speaker 1: of Baskerville, likely died of the plague. Alright, on that note,
Speaker 1: we're going to take a quick break, but when we
Speaker 1: come back we will continue our discussion of Acams razor.
Speaker 1: Thank alright, we're back, all right. So we've been talking
Speaker 1: about this principle known as Akam's razor that we've described
Speaker 1: already as the idea that simpler hypotheses are better than
Speaker 1: more complex hypotheses. There are a number of ways you
Speaker 1: can formulate it. But it's a principle that's been referred
Speaker 1: back to actually since probably before William of Akam. It is,
Speaker 1: I think, a principle that somewhat predates him in intellectual history,
Speaker 1: right right, He did not. He did not create something
Speaker 1: that was not already utilized by other thinkers of the
Speaker 1: day and thinkers before him. One great example of somebody
Speaker 1: not before William of Acham but later articulating similar ideas
Speaker 1: is Isaac Newton in his great work The Principia Mathematica.
Speaker 1: From Newton writes, quote, we are to admit no more
Speaker 1: causes of natural things than such as are both true
Speaker 1: and sufficient to explain their appearances. Uh So, a similar
Speaker 1: idea is there's no need to add extra explanations when
Speaker 1: you already have an explanation that is number one true
Speaker 1: and number two explains everything you see. Right. So, an
Speaker 1: example of this might be why do the planets orbit
Speaker 1: the Sun? This would be something that Newton would be
Speaker 1: concerned with. Newton would say, okay, we know of two
Speaker 1: forces that explain what we see, gravity and inertia. Inertia
Speaker 1: is the tendency of an object in motion to stay
Speaker 1: in motion. Gravity is the mutually attracting force between two
Speaker 1: objects with mass. So, because of inertia, the planets flying
Speaker 1: through space want to keep traveling in a straight line
Speaker 1: at a constant speed. And because of gravity, instead of
Speaker 1: traveling in a straight line, their path bends around towards
Speaker 1: the Sun as they travel. And so that those two
Speaker 1: things are both true, and they explain everything we observed,
Speaker 1: not now, actually not quite everything, but they were good
Speaker 1: enough for Newton's time explaining everything. You might also say, though,
Speaker 1: that maybe in addition to gravi d and inertia, there
Speaker 1: are angels that guide the planets in their orbits because
Speaker 1: those elliptical pathways are pleasing to the Lord. But if
Speaker 1: somebody proposes that, you're you're kind of stuck. Because there's
Speaker 1: no way to prove the angel hypothesis wrong. You can't
Speaker 1: say there aren't invisible angels guiding the planets. But pretty
Speaker 1: much everybody today, I think, even people who believe in
Speaker 1: angels in some sense, would not see any reason to
Speaker 1: believe that there are angels doing that, because there are
Speaker 1: other explanations which do all the explaining that needs to
Speaker 1: be done. Right, Yeah, I mean, once you drag angels
Speaker 1: into it too, it it opens up the door for
Speaker 1: just a never ending list of reasons why the angels
Speaker 1: can't be detected or why the you know, well, why
Speaker 1: the angel wanted why the planet seems to be behaving
Speaker 1: this way. It's in accordance with these known laws rather
Speaker 1: than the machinations of a divine being right, And you
Speaker 1: don't need to appeal in any way to the additional
Speaker 1: plausibility of angels or not. Like the reason I said
Speaker 1: that even people who otherwise believe in angels don't say
Speaker 1: that they're guiding the motions of the planets is you
Speaker 1: don't need them to explain that. And you've just got
Speaker 1: basic laws of physics that explain what the planets are doing.
Speaker 1: There's no reason to add an angel's explanation. It doesn't
Speaker 1: do anymore work. Yeah, it doesn't even help angels out.
Speaker 1: I mean, yeah, it's there. There's just no point in
Speaker 1: it now. Of course, sticking on the theory of like
Speaker 1: the motions of the planets for a minute, of course,
Speaker 1: we would have to later come up with a more
Speaker 1: refined theory of gravity for those rare cases where Newton's
Speaker 1: theory of gravity would fail, And we would get that
Speaker 1: with Einstein and general relativity, which recharacterized gravity is the
Speaker 1: curvature of space time caused by deformation due to mass,
Speaker 1: rather than as a mutually attractive force between objects, though
Speaker 1: in most cases if you think of it as a
Speaker 1: force in in the Newtonian sense, your predictions work out
Speaker 1: just fine. But from an article that I want to
Speaker 1: refer to later by a philosopher named Elliott sober Uh,
Speaker 1: he writes, quote Albert Einstein spoke for many when he
Speaker 1: said quote, it can scarcely be denied that the supreme
Speaker 1: goal of all the rie is to make the irreducible
Speaker 1: basic elements as simple and as few as possible without
Speaker 1: having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum
Speaker 1: of experience, which in a way is again articulating something
Speaker 1: like Ockham's razor. It's saying like, you want the simplest
Speaker 1: possible explanation that explains everything. And if we're sticking with
Speaker 1: Einstein for a minute, to go beyond positing something like angels,
Speaker 1: if if you want to go into real scientific hypotheses
Speaker 1: in history, there are all kinds of things that you
Speaker 1: might argue we're sort of done away with by an
Speaker 1: Acam's razor ish kind of process, though I think there
Speaker 1: are some historians and philosophers of science that might disagree there.
Speaker 1: But one example that comes to my mind is the
Speaker 1: luminiferous ether. You know, it was once believed by many
Speaker 1: scientists that there had to be a medium in space
Speaker 1: through which light propagates, right, the same way that if
Speaker 1: you want sound to propagate, there's no sound in space, right,
Speaker 1: You've got to have sound traveling through a medium like air,
Speaker 1: or like water, or like a you know, like a
Speaker 1: steel wire. There must be matter to transmit that energy.
Speaker 1: And so the idea was that space was filled with
Speaker 1: this stuff, this ether, that light waves propagated through. And eventually,
Speaker 1: due to Einstein and too other thinkers and experiments it
Speaker 1: it started to become clear that the ether was superfluous.
Speaker 1: You didn't need it to explain any of the properties
Speaker 1: of light. Now, there's another example from history that often
Speaker 1: comes up when people talk about Okham's razor. It's often
Speaker 1: brought up as a great example of Ockham's razor being applied.
Speaker 1: But we're gonna get to an article later on that
Speaker 1: I think has presents a pretty devastating case against this
Speaker 1: being true. But just to set it up here, it
Speaker 1: is the idea of comparing the Ptolemaic universe versus the
Speaker 1: Copernican universe, which obviously, this argument was brought to a
Speaker 1: very dramatic end UH in the life of Galileo. Right
Speaker 1: Galileo got into big trouble with the Inquisition for, among
Speaker 1: other things, they were also politics involved, but four, among
Speaker 1: other things, advocating the Copernican model over the Polemic model. UH.
Speaker 1: For simplicity's sake, the Copernican model of the Solar System
Speaker 1: was of course the one we know to be more
Speaker 1: basically correct, not totally correct, but more correct because it
Speaker 1: was heliocentric. It put the Sun at the center of
Speaker 1: the Solar System and argued that the other planets, including
Speaker 1: the Earth, all rotated around the Sun. UH. This of
Speaker 1: course was not the orthodox astronomy of the day. The
Speaker 1: more favored models were the traditional Toolemic model, which had
Speaker 1: the Earth at the center and the the planets all
Speaker 1: going around the Earth, and these strange kind of spirograph
Speaker 1: patterns that had these things called epicycles where they would
Speaker 1: sort of stop and then do a circle and another circle,
Speaker 1: and like loops within their their traveling um. And then
Speaker 1: you had some compromise models like the model of Tycho Brahi. Now,
Speaker 1: the traditional argument here in favor of saying, you know,
Speaker 1: Copernicus and Galileo were on the side of Occam's razor,
Speaker 1: it would go something like, well, the Ptolemaic system and
Speaker 1: the and the type Cobrahi models, they've got all this
Speaker 1: extra stuff. You need to assume, all these weird extra assumptions,
Speaker 1: like like epicycles, you know, like where the planets are
Speaker 1: going around in loops and it's not explained exactly why
Speaker 1: they're doing that. You just have to insert the loops
Speaker 1: in order to make it match our are our observations,
Speaker 1: and therefore the Tolemaic model was more complex. We'll come
Speaker 1: back to that later on, because I think now it's
Speaker 1: going to be important to get into some criticisms of
Speaker 1: Acams razor. You know, if you go into especially a
Speaker 1: lot of like kind of skeptic communities on the Internet,
Speaker 1: you might sometimes see people treating ocams razor as if
Speaker 1: it is some kind of law of nature, like referring
Speaker 1: to Akam's razor in the same way you might refer
Speaker 1: to proven theories about reality, uh, such as you know,
Speaker 1: the equations describing the action of gravity or something. Uh.
Speaker 1: And so I think while OCAM's razor is an interesting
Speaker 1: and sometimes useful skeptical lens to apply, it is not
Speaker 1: in fact a law of nature. And then there are
Speaker 1: a couple of major branches of criticisms of ye old razor.
Speaker 1: I think the first would be like accusations that it
Speaker 1: is often misunderstood or misused. And then second there would
Speaker 1: be actual attacks on the usefulness of the razor, even
Speaker 1: when it is in its supposedly true form. Now, the
Speaker 1: first thing would be pretty simple, and it's just the
Speaker 1: idea that Ockham's razor is misunderstood, misquoted, misconstrued, misused. Uh.
Speaker 1: I Actually I came across a funny blog post that,
Speaker 1: of all things, pointed to a quote from a mystery
Speaker 1: writer named Harlan Coben. Uh mystery writers, yeah, uh yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm not familiar with this writer, but I thought this
Speaker 1: was interesting this would you know? It was just an
Speaker 1: example of somebody saying, no, you're not using Ockham's razor, right,
Speaker 1: this writer wrote quote, most people oversimplify Ockham's razor to
Speaker 1: mean the simplest answer is usually correct, but the real
Speaker 1: meaning what the Franciscan Friar William of Oakin really wanted
Speaker 1: to emphasize is that you shouldn't complicate, that you shouldn't
Speaker 1: stack a theory. If a simpler exploit nation was at
Speaker 1: the ready, pare it down, prune the excess. And so
Speaker 1: I think looking at it this way, this fits more
Speaker 1: with like the version that we were talking about with
Speaker 1: Isaac Newton. Right. It's not necessarily a statement about simplicity
Speaker 1: as a general principle, but saying that you shouldn't stack
Speaker 1: things that explain the same outcomes on top of each
Speaker 1: other because you get no extra usefulness out of that.
Speaker 1: Another example that I was just thinking of that's come
Speaker 1: up on the show before is the idea of aquatic
Speaker 1: ape theory. Oh yes, this is the idea that, among
Speaker 1: other things, humans are hairless because for a while our
Speaker 1: our ancestors lived at least partially in the water. Yeah.
Speaker 1: The ideas you look at a lot of our body
Speaker 1: features are relatively smooth skin, bipedalism, layers of subcutaneous fat, uh,
Speaker 1: the abilities of our vocal cords, all kinds of things
Speaker 1: like that. The proponents of aquatic ape theory say, hey,
Speaker 1: we've got all these strange anatomical more logical features that
Speaker 1: are not the same as other great apes. Why do
Speaker 1: we have those qualities? I think you could explain them
Speaker 1: all if humans once needed to be in the water,
Speaker 1: so they needed to be smooth. You have smooth skin
Speaker 1: in order to be aerodynamic swimmers, and they became bipedal
Speaker 1: so that they could wade around in the water. And
Speaker 1: you come up with a list of explanations along these
Speaker 1: lines that they would argue all point to an aquatic ancestry.
Speaker 1: But there's a wrinkle there, because, of course, if that's
Speaker 1: all true, the question is, then why did we retain
Speaker 1: all those features after leaving the water? You know, humans
Speaker 1: are not an aquatic species now, I mean, we can
Speaker 1: go into the water, but water is not our primary
Speaker 1: environmental niche So what you know, how can we still
Speaker 1: have all those features? And the the aquatic ape theorists
Speaker 1: might say, oh, well, once you came onto the land,
Speaker 1: it actually was useful to be bipedal for these other reasons,
Speaker 1: and which useful to be hairless for these other reasons,
Speaker 1: which means you could cut out an entire step of
Speaker 1: having to be in the water to stick with these
Speaker 1: are useful for living on the land exactly you, I'd
Speaker 1: apply ACAM here and say, if those features turn out
Speaker 1: to be useful on land, why wouldn't they just evolve
Speaker 1: on land in the first place? Right, So there is
Speaker 1: like you've you've you've been up then creating or redirecting
Speaker 1: to the hypothesis that is one enormous step shorter. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and so aquatic ape theory, I think is one of
Speaker 1: those things that, like it would be hard to completely disprove.
Speaker 1: I think that there is no physical evidence pointing toward it.
Speaker 1: It would be hard to say this is impossible to
Speaker 1: have happened, but there's just no reason to assume it.
Speaker 1: It just it just like adds in an extra step
Speaker 1: of explanations that don't explain anything any better than other
Speaker 1: explanations could. Yeah. I mean, it's kind of like if
Speaker 1: I come home from work and I have say beer
Speaker 1: and bread. Uh, maybe I stopped at two places to
Speaker 1: get the beer in the bread. I got the beer
Speaker 1: at one place and the bread of the other, But
Speaker 1: I also probably just stopped at one store to get
Speaker 1: both of them. Both are likely one is a shorter trip.
Speaker 1: I feel like you would also have to add in
Speaker 1: something it kind of extravagant that would be like you
Speaker 1: stopped at the way home and you entered a raffle
Speaker 1: contest in which you won beer and bread. Uh. And
Speaker 1: then you also may have stopped at the store, you know,
Speaker 1: to get something else, but like, yeah, I stole beer
Speaker 1: and bread, as like when the simple explanation is probably
Speaker 1: probably just bought beer and bread. Where beer and bread
Speaker 1: was was placed in my car by a mysterious stranger.
Speaker 1: Like these are all things that are possible and could
Speaker 1: conceivably be the reason that I have beer and bread
Speaker 1: in the car. But OCAM's razor slices away the unnecessary steps,
Speaker 1: the less likely steps for the the shorter trip between
Speaker 1: point and point B. Right. And I think in cases
Speaker 1: like that, you could say that ocums raizor doesn't necessarily
Speaker 1: prove a theory wrong, but it is kind of a
Speaker 1: useful heuristic. It might help you use your intellectual time wisely. Right. Uh.
Speaker 1: But and and that gets us to the next step,
Speaker 1: which is the more comprehensive criticism, the idea that ACAM
Speaker 1: is maybe in act wrong, more not useful. I think
Speaker 1: in some cases this criticism is true, so maybe we
Speaker 1: should get into it a bit. The first article I
Speaker 1: wanted to look at is called The Tyranny of Simple Explanations,
Speaker 1: and it was published in the Atlantic. It was written
Speaker 1: by the science writer Philip Ball, one of my favorite
Speaker 1: current science writers, who wrote the book Beyond Weird, a
Speaker 1: really fantastic book about quantum physics that I recommended last summer.
Speaker 1: This is one of your summer reading picks. I think, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's really good. It's one of those books that you
Speaker 1: may think you already you know, you've already read a
Speaker 1: quantum physics book. You know, you know the basics, you know,
Speaker 1: you know the the what the interpretations are and all that.
Speaker 1: I feel like this is one you can still be
Speaker 1: newly amazed by and learn a lot more from and
Speaker 1: true form as a great science writer. Ball I think
Speaker 1: makes a fantastic case in this article against Stockholm's razor,
Speaker 1: against you know, a liberal use of it. So he
Speaker 1: starts by saying, quote, Ockham's razor is often stated as
Speaker 1: an injunction not to make more assumptions than you absolutely need.
Speaker 1: And in that way, it's almost a truism, right, I mean, like,
Speaker 1: when when you phrase it that way, who would say, well, yeah, no,
Speaker 1: I want to make more assumptions than I need. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean you can come back to, like a forensic example, right,
Speaker 1: detective work, which even Carl Sagan makes a discuss this
Speaker 1: a lot like committing science to UH to the work
Speaker 1: of a detective, like how many hypotheses do you need
Speaker 1: for a murder? Right, and you know there's gonna You're
Speaker 1: gonna be the obvious ones that you know, especially the
Speaker 1: acam's razer, are going to be the primary candidates that
Speaker 1: it was someone the victim knew, that it was, like
Speaker 1: a spouse or a friend, etcetera. Uh, Rather than inventing
Speaker 1: wild scenarios with no evidence to base them on, right, saying,
Speaker 1: you know, certainly getting into possible scenarios like maybe it
Speaker 1: was the random work of a serial murder. Serial murders exist,
Speaker 1: this does happen from time to time, but is it
Speaker 1: the most likely scenario? And then that's not even getting
Speaker 1: into wilder possibilities like well, perhaps it was a an assassin,
Speaker 1: a spy whom it's took them for another person. Well
Speaker 1: that's possible too, but again, more far more steps that
Speaker 1: are necessary, the the shorter trip is the more likely. Right,
Speaker 1: And in terms of not making more assumptions than you need,
Speaker 1: ball rights that this is of course good advice. If
Speaker 1: you're trying to come up with a good explanation for something,
Speaker 1: you add nothing by writing in a bunch of extra
Speaker 1: complications that don't help the explanation explain anything more than
Speaker 1: it did when it was simpler. They should. Explanations should
Speaker 1: be as simple as they can be without losing power
Speaker 1: to explain and predict. Quote. That's why most scientific theories
Speaker 1: are intentional simplifications. They ignore some effects, not because they
Speaker 1: don't happen, but because they're thought to have a negligible
Speaker 1: effect on the outcome. Applied this way, simplicity is a
Speaker 1: practical virtue allowing a clearer view of what's most important
Speaker 1: in a phenomenon. So again, he's saying there that okhams Razor.
Speaker 1: It's it's not necessarily that Okams razor tells you what's true,
Speaker 1: but Acams razor makes theories useful because then he goes
Speaker 1: on to argue that Acam's razor is quote fetishized and
Speaker 1: misapplied as a guiding beacon for scientific inquiry. So he thinks, what,
Speaker 1: you know, what we're just saying, Simplicity is a virtue
Speaker 1: of theories and explanations because they make theories clearer, easier
Speaker 1: to use, but it's dangerous to jump from that to
Speaker 1: the assumption that simplicity is actually a measure of truth.
Speaker 1: Quote here, the the implication is the simplest theory isn't
Speaker 1: just more convenient, but gets closer to how nature really works.
Speaker 1: In other words, it's more probably the correct. One Ball
Speaker 1: says this is wrong is simplicity does not actually tell
Speaker 1: you anything about which theories are right and which ones
Speaker 1: are wrong. He argues, there's really no reason to believe
Speaker 1: that simpler theories better described nature than complicated ones, and
Speaker 1: he gives a few examples. He talks about Francis Crick
Speaker 1: warning against trying to apply Okham's razor as a critical
Speaker 1: tool for theories and biology because biology gets really messy,
Speaker 1: and he cites examples where it kind of led us astray.
Speaker 1: Like he he cites Alfred Kempy's eighteen seventy nine proof
Speaker 1: of the four color theorem and mathematics, which was kind
Speaker 1: of favored for a while because the proof was considered
Speaker 1: very simple and very elegant, but it turned out to
Speaker 1: be wrong, you know, very roughly. Here, it makes me
Speaker 1: think of something we talked about before in the show
Speaker 1: about how how evolution is often kind of a miser
Speaker 1: it's often cheap. Uh, and so part of that you
Speaker 1: could you could apply the simplicity model to that and say, Okay,
Speaker 1: it's that means it tends to take the shortest route,
Speaker 1: it tends to to perhaps engage in simplicity, but at
Speaker 1: the same time, uh, it's kind of lazy, and lazy
Speaker 1: can create these sort of messes where and yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: we're saying like some biological structure has evolved, you know,
Speaker 1: for one thing, but it ends up getting partially abandoned
Speaker 1: and re used for something else, And it can get
Speaker 1: it can get messy, it can get complicated. Million years
Speaker 1: of shortcuts can turn into a quite circuitous route. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and so Ball rights that in his view, he has
Speaker 1: not found a single case in the history of science
Speaker 1: where Akham's razor was actually used to settle a debate
Speaker 1: between rival theories. So I just want to make sure
Speaker 1: that his distinction is coming through. He is saying, it's
Speaker 1: useful for trying to make theories easier to talk about,
Speaker 1: easier to understand, easier to apply, But when it comes
Speaker 1: between competing theories, trying to say which one is more
Speaker 1: true which one makes better predictions. He has not found
Speaker 1: a single case where Okam's razor was the decisive factor.
Speaker 1: And what's worse, he says a lot of people have
Speaker 1: tried to retroactively apply Ockham's razor to historical scientific debates
Speaker 1: where it was not in fact decisive in reality. Uh
Speaker 1: And he cites as an example a debate we've already
Speaker 1: discussed the geocentric versus the heliocentric solar system. And I
Speaker 1: thought his take on this was really interesting because I
Speaker 1: I had been taken in. I think I had previously thought, well,
Speaker 1: maybe a really good case of Akham's razor is heliocentrism
Speaker 1: winning over geocentrism, because with geocentrism you just had to
Speaker 1: make all these weird assumptions about the movements of planet.
Speaker 1: You had to do extra work to make it fit, right,
Speaker 1: That's what I thought. But he actually digs into the
Speaker 1: debate of the time Ball points out that in reality,
Speaker 1: So you know, we talked about one of the big
Speaker 1: things being all these epicycles that in the ptolemic model,
Speaker 1: the the geocentric view, the planets go around the Earth,
Speaker 1: but they don't just go around. They make all these
Speaker 1: weird loops and stuff called epicycles. You had to build
Speaker 1: that in in order to explain what astronomers saw in
Speaker 1: the night sky, the planets appearing to regress. They'd go
Speaker 1: back and forth and stuff. Um so, so he says,
Speaker 1: we've got all these epicycles. But Ball points out that
Speaker 1: in reality, the Copernican model that was being argued about
Speaker 1: in Galileo's day, that heliocentric model, was also full of epicycles.
Speaker 1: And this was because Copernicus was not aware of what
Speaker 1: Johannes Kepler would later discover about the orbits of planetary
Speaker 1: bodies being elliptical rather than circular. So because he lacked
Speaker 1: that crucial assumption that that important part of the theory,
Speaker 1: Copernicus also had to build weird little loops into his
Speaker 1: heliocentric model of the Solar System. He got the heliocentrism right,
Speaker 1: but he thought the planets were moving in perfect circles
Speaker 1: that didn't match observations either. So like Ptolemy, he he cheated.
Speaker 1: He put all these loops in there to make the
Speaker 1: model work out right, and it wasn't until heliocentrism was
Speaker 1: combined with Kepler and elliptical orbits that the epicycles were
Speaker 1: finally banished, and based on this, Ball argues that there
Speaker 1: was really no way at the time to suggest that
Speaker 1: the Copernican system was simpler. In fact, he points out
Speaker 1: that Copernicus invokes a number of weird, non scientific assumptions
Speaker 1: in support of his model. For example, quote uh, in
Speaker 1: his main work on the heliocentric theory, De revolutiontionibus, I'm
Speaker 1: gonna have trouble with this one day revolutiontionibus orbium celestium. Uh,
Speaker 1: he argued that it was proper for the sun to
Speaker 1: sit at the center quote, as if resting on a
Speaker 1: kingly throne, governing the stars like a wise ruler. That
Speaker 1: doesn't sound like a very scientific criterion. No, I mean,
Speaker 1: maybe he's kind of breaking it down for people, you know.
Speaker 1: I mean, of course he did turn out to be right,
Speaker 1: But like that, that seems like an unjustified assumption based
Speaker 1: on what he knew at the time. Uh. Ball also
Speaker 1: points out that by the time Kepler comes around, we're
Speaker 1: no longer in a situation of competing theories trying to
Speaker 1: explain the same observations, because Kepler had access to better observations. Quote.
Speaker 1: The point here is that as a tool for distinguishing
Speaker 1: between rival theories. Occam's razor is only relevant if the
Speaker 1: two theories predict identical results, but one is simpler than
Speaker 1: the other, which is to say, it makes fewer assumptions.
Speaker 1: This is a situation rarely, if ever, encountered in science.
Speaker 1: Much more often theories are distinguish not by making fewer assumptions,
Speaker 1: but different ones. It's then not obvious how to weigh
Speaker 1: them up. I think this is a fantastic point, right,
Speaker 1: I think to come back to the aquatic ape theory
Speaker 1: like that, that is one of these rare situations. I
Speaker 1: think that it seems to match up, right, it's making
Speaker 1: additional assumptions, and it's like, oh, yeah, we would have
Speaker 1: to keep those traits later anyway, we need explanations for that.
Speaker 1: It just seems like it's making more assumptions. But that's
Speaker 1: almost never how it goes. Usually the assumption is just
Speaker 1: different assumptions, and then how do you know which assumption
Speaker 1: is simpler than the other one? Right, the the whole
Speaker 1: aquatic ape section of the of presumed evolutionary advancement is
Speaker 1: kind of its own epicycle. Yeah, exactly removed because there's
Speaker 1: an epicycle in this theory but not in this one exactly. Yes,
Speaker 1: I mean, if you're trying to look at like not
Speaker 1: additional assumptions in the theory, but just different assumptions in
Speaker 1: the theory. Even cases where to us it might seem
Speaker 1: obvious one way or another, which one seems simple, alert
Speaker 1: it's not always obvious to people at the time. Uh
Speaker 1: he He brings up the question of Darwinian evolution, is
Speaker 1: descent from a common ancestor more or less complicated than
Speaker 1: the idea of a divine created order common descent? I
Speaker 1: think that would seem like a less complicated theory to
Speaker 1: many of us today, But would it have seemed simpler
Speaker 1: to the world view of people who were debating common
Speaker 1: descent in like the mid late nineteenth century. Who you know,
Speaker 1: you've already got a theistic worldview that's basically a built
Speaker 1: in assumption, right right, Yeah, Yeah. A lot of this
Speaker 1: does come down again coming to what we spoke about
Speaker 1: earlier regarding the basic religious argument. Like if you're coming
Speaker 1: from a really religious background where we've had this um this,
Speaker 1: you know, the the idea the reality of a God
Speaker 1: hammered into you, and then you're presented with with with
Speaker 1: the atheist argument you know, you may say, well know
Speaker 1: that that is that requires far of there had so
Speaker 1: many epicycles in your your your your atheism, where my
Speaker 1: my face is just a clear and straightforward as a whistle.
Speaker 1: I mean people did actually argue that way. They'd say,
Speaker 1: look at all this weird stuff you have to assume
Speaker 1: about the history of life, and all I believe is
Speaker 1: there's a divine created order. I mean, that's it's like
Speaker 1: a moper sticker thing, like, uh, what God, God wrote it,
Speaker 1: I believe it in the story three steps that theory, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it is a simplicity is often in the eye of
Speaker 1: the beholder, like you don't have I mean, there are
Speaker 1: some people who would argue there are cases where you
Speaker 1: can try to mathematically quantify uh, complications or assumptions or simplicity,
Speaker 1: but in general that's really hard to do. You don't
Speaker 1: have an objective measure that you can apply from the outside.
Speaker 1: A lot of times it's just going to be kind
Speaker 1: of fuzzy qualitative judgments. What what seems like less of
Speaker 1: an assumption to you. You lack an objective measure, people
Speaker 1: go with their intuitions. Uh, and this does not seem
Speaker 1: like a good recipe for sorting between theories. So, coming
Speaker 1: back again to two balse formulation of of Okham's razor,
Speaker 1: It's basically like, if you have two theories that are
Speaker 1: competing to explain the same things, they make all the
Speaker 1: same predictions and explain it equally well. Yeah, they explain
Speaker 1: that they make the same predictions explain things equally well.
Speaker 1: But one of them has more assumptions, you go with
Speaker 1: the one with fewer assumptions. But Ball argues that you
Speaker 1: almost never, in reality get cases where the predictions of
Speaker 1: two theories are exactly the same. Instead quote, scientific models
Speaker 1: that differ in their assumptions typically make slightly different predictions too.
Speaker 1: It is these predictions, not the criteria of simplicity, that
Speaker 1: are of the greatest use for evaluating rival theories. Again,
Speaker 1: I think this is a good point. I mean, theories
Speaker 1: almost never predict the exact same thing, so why not
Speaker 1: just judge them on how good their predictions are. Uh. Finally,
Speaker 1: he writes that he can only think of one real
Speaker 1: instance in UH, in science where there are rival theories
Speaker 1: that make exactly the same predictions on the basis of
Speaker 1: quote easily in new morable and comparable assumptions. And this
Speaker 1: one example he can think of is the different interpretations
Speaker 1: of quantum mechanics, which I think is a fantastic example,
Speaker 1: and that did not come to my mind, but I
Speaker 1: think he's exactly right about this. So we've discussed interpretations
Speaker 1: of quantum mechanics on the show before. We're not going
Speaker 1: to go deep on that, but just for a very
Speaker 1: short refresher. Basically, we know that the mathematical fundamentals of
Speaker 1: quantum theory are correct. They make extremely good predictions, like
Speaker 1: we know the theories right, but there's a problem. They
Speaker 1: predict a world of probabilities, not of certainties. So if
Speaker 1: you have a theory that predicts an electron will be
Speaker 1: fifty percent in one state and fifty percent in an
Speaker 1: opposite state, but we only ever observe physical reality embodying
Speaker 1: one state at a time, how do you resolve that
Speaker 1: it just does not match our experience of reality. So
Speaker 1: that's where the interpretations of quantum mechanics come in. There
Speaker 1: they're trying to reconcile this difference, explaining why the indeterministic,
Speaker 1: hobbabilistic quantum world somehow resolves into the solid deterministic world
Speaker 1: that we experience every day. And there are tons of interpretations.
Speaker 1: You've got like the classic Copenhagen interpretation, which predicts that
Speaker 1: objects exist in a kind of in a state of
Speaker 1: superposition until something interacts with them and collapses the way
Speaker 1: of function makes them assume one state or the other.
Speaker 1: You've got the now popular many worlds interpretation, originating with
Speaker 1: the physicist you Ever at the Third in the late
Speaker 1: nineteen fifties. This suggests that reality is constantly splitting into
Speaker 1: infinite alternate timelines based on the different possible outcomes of
Speaker 1: unresolved quantum states. And and we only observe one outcome
Speaker 1: because we are also splitting, and the current version of
Speaker 1: us is only one of many uses that experiences one
Speaker 1: world at a time. And then you've got a bunch
Speaker 1: of other theories to Basically, these interpretations make exactly the
Speaker 1: same physical predictions. No matter which one of them is correct,
Speaker 1: the outcomes of our experiments will be exactly the s aim,
Speaker 1: so there's no way to test which one is right. Though,
Speaker 1: And in a funny turn, Ball points out that Ockham's
Speaker 1: razor has been invoked both for and against the many
Speaker 1: worlds interpretation, again coming back to the fact that a
Speaker 1: lot of times this just comes down to people's intuitive judgments,
Speaker 1: like he quotes the quantum theorist role in omnus quote,
Speaker 1: as far as economy of thought is concerned, there never
Speaker 1: was anything in the history of thought so bluntly contrary
Speaker 1: to Ockham's rule than ever it's many worlds. On the
Speaker 1: other hand, you've got a modern physicist like Sean Carroll
Speaker 1: of of Caltech who advocates the many world's interpretation, specifically
Speaker 1: because he argues it's the simplest interpretation of quantum theory.
Speaker 1: He says, it doesn't make any additional assumptions. It's the
Speaker 1: simplest way you can map the theory onto reality. The
Speaker 1: weird thing about about this, too, is that I feel like,
Speaker 1: at this point, if you consume enough science fiction, and
Speaker 1: not even just science fiction but general just popular culture,
Speaker 1: the many World's interpretation has been and you did, at
Speaker 1: least casually so often, then in a way it feels
Speaker 1: slightly more plausible, just because just due to familiarity, which
Speaker 1: I realized is not a scientific argue, like you could
Speaker 1: not you could not reasonably say, well, I leaned towards
Speaker 1: many worlds interpretation because that's how The X Men works.
Speaker 1: My favorite TV show uses it. It's got to be real,
Speaker 1: but on on some like level, it's still kind of good.
Speaker 1: Gets into you, it still affects you. I agree. I
Speaker 1: mean again, I think this is this is pointing out
Speaker 1: some of the weaknesses and how Alcam's razor is often applied.
Speaker 1: It's like people think they're applying some kind of objective
Speaker 1: criterion when really they're just kind of going with their
Speaker 1: gut about like what what feels more plausible? Uh. And
Speaker 1: and that's something Ball kind of hammers home at the
Speaker 1: end when he writes quote, but this is all just
Speaker 1: special pleading. Acam's razor was never meant for pairing nature
Speaker 1: down to some beautiful, parsimonious core of truth. Because science
Speaker 1: is so difficult and messy, the allure of a philosophical
Speaker 1: tool for clearing a path or pruning the thickets is obvious. Yes,
Speaker 1: in the readiness to find spurious applications of Akham's razors
Speaker 1: in the history of science, or to enlist, dismiss, or
Speaker 1: reshape the razor at will to shore up their preferences.
Speaker 1: Scientists reveal their seduction by this vision, but they should
Speaker 1: resist it. The value of keeping assumptions to a minimum
Speaker 1: is cognitive not ontological. It helps you think a theory
Speaker 1: is not better if it is simpler, but it might
Speaker 1: well be more useful, and that counts for much more. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's well put. It helps us think, read it, and
Speaker 1: help us explain the world. Right, there's no way to
Speaker 1: show that well. Actually, so we're about to get into
Speaker 1: somebody who says that there may be cases where you
Speaker 1: can show simpler theories are objectively more true. But but
Speaker 1: Ball argues that at least most of the time in
Speaker 1: science and real competing theories in the history of science,
Speaker 1: it's not that simpler theories are more true or explain
Speaker 1: reality better. They're just easier to get your head around
Speaker 1: and test. All right, on that note, we're gonna take
Speaker 1: one more break, but we will be right back with
Speaker 1: further discussion of the razor. Alright, we're back, All right.
Speaker 1: There's one more article about Akham's razor that I found
Speaker 1: really interesting, very useful, and it is called why is
Speaker 1: Simpler Better? This was published in Eon by Elliott Sober,
Speaker 1: who is a professor of philosophy at the University of Wisconsin, Madison,
Speaker 1: and he's published a lot on the philosophy of science,
Speaker 1: specifically as it applies to biology and natural selection, and
Speaker 1: he wrote a book on the subject of Akham's razor. Uh.
Speaker 1: So he starts off, I think this is kind of
Speaker 1: interesting talking about simplicity and complexity and art. Could you
Speaker 1: possibly have a norm that one is always better than
Speaker 1: the other? I mean that seems kind of strange, right,
Speaker 1: Like we love simple art and we love complex art,
Speaker 1: and it would be strange to find a person who
Speaker 1: just wants one or the other. Yeah, I mean this
Speaker 1: makes me think of of movie posters. I don't know,
Speaker 1: you probably remember it seems like it was a few
Speaker 1: year is back. The big craze for a while was
Speaker 1: that the designers would come up with a super simplistic
Speaker 1: movie poster for classic film or a you know, a
Speaker 1: fan favorite film. And it was really fun for a while.
Speaker 1: And uh and but then it kind of overstate it's welcome,
Speaker 1: you know, and and and it just became kind of,
Speaker 1: at least to me anyway, kind of kind of irritating
Speaker 1: to even look at. You're like, no, I don't don't
Speaker 1: want to see like this film reduced to this ultra
Speaker 1: simplistic symbol. I know exactly what you're talking about. And
Speaker 1: I think there was a counter reaction. Yeah, because then
Speaker 1: you started to see a lot of graphic design for
Speaker 1: redoing old movies with new posters in the kind of
Speaker 1: Return of the Jedi stuff where there's a bunch of stuff,
Speaker 1: there's like a bunch of people on the poster and
Speaker 1: things happening. Yeah, or that it's just kind of like
Speaker 1: a geometric explosion of things, you know. Uh so, yeah,
Speaker 1: you so saw the pendulum swing both ways. But in general, yeah,
Speaker 1: I feel like it's that way in art. I mean,
Speaker 1: I think we can all point to specific examples in
Speaker 1: our own life where here's something we like that it's
Speaker 1: very very tight and neat and minimalists. Maybe it's even
Speaker 1: like a musical argument. Yeah, I love like minimalist ambient recordings,
Speaker 1: but I'm also the type of person who enjoys uh
Speaker 1: cacophonist recordings and complex recordings, and likewise with visual arts,
Speaker 1: likewise with you know, film, TV and other mediums you
Speaker 1: you like hugely layered like mixed tracks and stuff. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but then I also like, uh, you know, I love
Speaker 1: I don't know, I don't, I don't know that it
Speaker 1: gets kind of complicated, right, because even something that is
Speaker 1: very minimalist can be of course very complicated and layered. Uh.
Speaker 1: But but yeah, I think everybody is gonna everybody's taste
Speaker 1: pendulum is going to swing both ways there. But that's
Speaker 1: the world of art though, right, I mean, so that's
Speaker 1: one thing. That's the world of human creation. Um. And
Speaker 1: sometimes those creations are are made, uh to mimic nature,
Speaker 1: but they are not necessarily nature itself. Right, Yes, And
Speaker 1: I think you can apply something similar to science. So
Speaker 1: some of what Sober is going to write in this
Speaker 1: article mirrors what we were just talking about with Ball.
Speaker 1: Like he he starts off by saying, Okay, it's clear
Speaker 1: that simpler theories have some qualities that are good. They're
Speaker 1: easier to understand, they're easier to remember, they're easier to test, uh,
Speaker 1: And of course in just an aesthetic sense, they can
Speaker 1: be more beautiful. But he says that the real problem
Speaker 1: comes in when you're trying to figure out how good
Speaker 1: is a theory for telling you what's true? You know,
Speaker 1: how well does it predict things that you will encounter
Speaker 1: in the world. Some pasta scientific thinkers have tried to
Speaker 1: come up with reasons why. Yeah, it's like simplicity is
Speaker 1: actually better. It actually predicts predicts the world better. And
Speaker 1: a lot of these justifications were theological in nature. Uh.
Speaker 1: Like for example, in Newton and talking about why he
Speaker 1: prefers simpler theories, wrote quote to choose those constructions which,
Speaker 1: without straining, reduced things to the greatest simplicity. Uh. The
Speaker 1: reason of this is that truth is ever to be
Speaker 1: found in simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion
Speaker 1: of things. It is the perfection of God's works that
Speaker 1: they are all done with the greatest simplicity. He is
Speaker 1: the God of order and not of confusion. And therefore,
Speaker 1: as they that would understand the frame of the world
Speaker 1: must endeavor to reduce their knowledge to all possible simplicity.
Speaker 1: So it must be in seeking to understand these visions.
Speaker 1: So again, I mean, I would say that's fine to
Speaker 1: believe that. That's not a scientific reason for believing things
Speaker 1: that simpler things are more likely to be true. Right,
Speaker 1: had to fall back on the idea that we have
Speaker 1: a lawful, good God as opposed to a chaotic good God. Right,
Speaker 1: I mean, it would only be a bad God that
Speaker 1: would allow more complex explanations to be correct. And so
Speaker 1: were actually says there are some cases today, uh that
Speaker 1: can help us know when a model is objectively more accurate,
Speaker 1: like modern statistical methods, there are some ways that you
Speaker 1: can reduce theories to mathematical advantage, at least roughly, and
Speaker 1: that in these cases there there are times where you
Speaker 1: can show simpler is actually better. Uh. He argues, there
Speaker 1: reparadigms in which Occam's razor holds true, and so the
Speaker 1: first one is that sometimes simpler theories actually have higher probabilities.
Speaker 1: He invokes the medical adage here, don't chase zebras. This
Speaker 1: is this comes from the idea of you know, when
Speaker 1: you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras. I've also heard
Speaker 1: that as unicorns. As another analogy, if you hear footsteps
Speaker 1: coming down the hall, you can have a couple of
Speaker 1: different hypotheses. It's a human walking down the hall, or
Speaker 1: it's a RoboCop walking down the hall, which one is
Speaker 1: going to be correct more often, Well, it's going to
Speaker 1: be a human. It could either conceivably be somebody in
Speaker 1: a RoboCup cost him, but the chances of that are
Speaker 1: pretty slimp. I mean, unless you like are in a
Speaker 1: RoboCop factory or something. It's going to be a human
Speaker 1: way more often, And the same goes in diagnosing diseases.
Speaker 1: If you observe a set of symptoms in patient history
Speaker 1: that are equally likely to predict a common disease and
Speaker 1: a rare disease, pick the common one, you're going to
Speaker 1: be correct more often than if you always pick the
Speaker 1: rare one. Right. Um. You know this also brings me
Speaker 1: back to the serial killer example. You know, like, what
Speaker 1: what is more more likely though that it's someone that
Speaker 1: the individual new, or it is a random killing by
Speaker 1: a serial murder. You know, unless there is a serial
Speaker 1: murder active in the area, which raises that that the
Speaker 1: chances for that to be true, but by a considerable margin. Uh,
Speaker 1: it's going to remain a zebra. Now a unicorn, but
Speaker 1: a zebra exactly unless you have independent evidence pointing to
Speaker 1: that as a superior hypothesis. There's no reason to go
Speaker 1: to a rare phenomenon that would explain things equally. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: so I know it seems like there are enough podcasts
Speaker 1: about serial murders. It might seem like there are more
Speaker 1: of them out there than there are. Well, there you
Speaker 1: get into some cognitive biases from Yeah, the availability heuristic
Speaker 1: kicks in But of course, another question is, like, how
Speaker 1: often does a thorough review actually put you in the
Speaker 1: situation where two things explain what you see equally well,
Speaker 1: like truly equally well. One's rare and one's comm But
Speaker 1: but so Sober says that you've got this concept he
Speaker 1: calls the razor of silence, and and the basic explanation
Speaker 1: of this is that if you've got evidence that A
Speaker 1: is the cause of something and no evidence that B
Speaker 1: is the cause of something, then A alone is statistically
Speaker 1: a better explanation than A and B together. This goes
Speaker 1: back to the stacking of explanations that we were talking
Speaker 1: about earlier, Like, if you've got an explanation that already
Speaker 1: explains everything, there is no justification for adding additional explanations
Speaker 1: on top of it. That you don't need to add
Speaker 1: the angels pushing the planets right, Well, let's come back
Speaker 1: to the murder scenario. How do we apply this forensically? Uh? Well,
Speaker 1: as so we're actually I think says something kind of
Speaker 1: like this, But like, if you have clear evidence of
Speaker 1: one cause of death on somebody, you don't need to
Speaker 1: assume extra causes of death stacking on top of it
Speaker 1: without direct evidence of them as well. So if you
Speaker 1: find like a you know, a body, I don't know,
Speaker 1: a body the bottom of a cliff and they're dead,
Speaker 1: you can assume that it was falling off the cliff
Speaker 1: that killed them. You don't need to also assume that
Speaker 1: they were poisoned or something. King unless you know, you
Speaker 1: do blood talks and then it comes back with poison.
Speaker 1: You can't assume it then. But there's no reason to
Speaker 1: start stacking on additional assumptions. Now there's another way that
Speaker 1: sober says sometimes OCAM's razer actually does hold true. It
Speaker 1: it's sometimes simpler explanations are better, and it's simply that
Speaker 1: sometimes simpler theories are better supported by observations. Uh. He
Speaker 1: gives this great example. Suppose all the lights on your
Speaker 1: street go out. You could have two competing hypotheses. First
Speaker 1: one something happened at the power plant and that influenced
Speaker 1: what happened to all the lights in the neighborhood, or
Speaker 1: maybe there's a down power line something like that. The
Speaker 1: other one, something happened to all of the light bulbs
Speaker 1: at the same time. Now, these would both explain the observations, right,
Speaker 1: Like either either all of the light bulbs suddenly went
Speaker 1: out on their own independently, just coincidentally, all at the
Speaker 1: same time, or there's something happened with the power supply
Speaker 1: to the whole neighborhood. Sober argues, based on the work
Speaker 1: of the philosopher Hans Reichenbach, that in this case you
Speaker 1: can actually show mathematically that the evidence for the first
Speaker 1: for the power plant hypothesis is stronger, just based on
Speaker 1: the fact that it's simpler. Uh. And a similar example
Speaker 1: in real science look at common descent in biology. So
Speaker 1: based on the evidence of massive amounts of genetic code
Speaker 1: shared by all living things today, people usually say, okay,
Speaker 1: that that's evidence of common descent. We all share a
Speaker 1: common ancestor, we all inherit some common genetic code. Now
Speaker 1: you could also say, well, maybe all living things on
Speaker 1: Earth have different ancestors and they just happened by coincidence
Speaker 1: to have overlapping strings of genetic code. That would require
Speaker 1: a lot of strange coincidences. So the evidence actually favors
Speaker 1: common descent, just like it favors a power outage over
Speaker 1: hundreds of simultaneous light bulb failures. So a serial killer
Speaker 1: example of this might be, oh man, what's happening in
Speaker 1: the dark corners of your brain today, Rob, I don't know,
Speaker 1: I just keep coming back to it, I guess. But okay,
Speaker 1: so one person. So if like people, they're all these
Speaker 1: dead people and they all have say a death head,
Speaker 1: moth um, what was a caterpillar? Oh? Yes, yes, yes, yes?
Speaker 1: Or was it a cocoon? I can't recall off hand
Speaker 1: and from silence to the lamps. Yeah, they've got like
Speaker 1: a moth cocoon in their mouth or something. So perhaps
Speaker 1: they just happened to each individually wind up with one
Speaker 1: in their mouth, like somebody accidentally eight one one in
Speaker 1: the salad bar. Another one was like looking up and
Speaker 1: it fell out of a tree, because one had escaped
Speaker 1: from a private collection, was living in a tree. You
Speaker 1: could have sort of independent explanations for why each of
Speaker 1: these occurred. Or the other possibility is somebody's killing them
Speaker 1: and putting them in their throats. Right, the one common
Speaker 1: explanation actually explains observations better than assuming a whole bunch
Speaker 1: of strange coincidence. Yes, and then we got the third
Speaker 1: paradigm Sober gets into, which is that he says, sometimes
Speaker 1: the simplicity of a model is relevant to estimating its
Speaker 1: predictive accuracy. So what a good theories do well? They
Speaker 1: make accurate predictions about things we don't know yet. They
Speaker 1: either accurately predict future measurements or outcomes or discoveries. Does
Speaker 1: acams Raiser have anything to say here? Sober says yes,
Speaker 1: Sometimes simplicity affects our best guesses about how accurate a
Speaker 1: new theory will be, and he cites the work of
Speaker 1: a Japanese statistician named Hiratuga Akayiki, who did important work
Speaker 1: in a field called model selection theory. This means how
Speaker 1: to judge the strength of a new model or theory
Speaker 1: before it has had time to be tested in the field,
Speaker 1: and a model evaluation system called the Akayiki information criterion
Speaker 1: says that you can predict how good a new model
Speaker 1: or theory will be by two measures, how well it
Speaker 1: fits old or existing data. Obviously, better fits are better,
Speaker 1: and then how simple it is Simpler models are better. Uh.
Speaker 1: Simplicity is evaluated by quote the number of adjustable parameters
Speaker 1: and having few or is better. Now. Sober gives an
Speaker 1: analysis of why this is the case, using an example
Speaker 1: of trying to estimate the height of plants in a
Speaker 1: corn field based on previous random samplings of the fields.
Speaker 1: I'm not going to get down into all the details
Speaker 1: of this, but if you want a deeper understanding of
Speaker 1: this one, i'd recommend looking up the article that. The
Speaker 1: short version is that in some situations, depending on a
Speaker 1: number of assumptions about what types of models and data
Speaker 1: you're dealing with, simplicity of a model is actually a
Speaker 1: good predictor of how well future data will conform to
Speaker 1: that model. And it's just a fact about statistics. The
Speaker 1: sorcery of average is not a fact about individual cases
Speaker 1: on the ground. Now, he concludes by saying that these
Speaker 1: three paradigms have something uh in common and quote whether
Speaker 1: a given problem fits into any of them depends on
Speaker 1: empirical assumptions about the problem. Those assumptions might be true
Speaker 1: of some problems but false of others. Although parsimony is
Speaker 1: demonstrably relevant in forming judgments about what the world is like,
Speaker 1: there is, in the end no un conditional and presupposition
Speaker 1: less justification for Ockham's razor. Uh So that's tough, right,
Speaker 1: Like Ockham's razor is not a tool you can apply
Speaker 1: to every situation to get closer to the truth. It's
Speaker 1: a tool that is useful sometimes for some types of judgment,
Speaker 1: and the real difficulty is recognizing when you're in one
Speaker 1: of those situations in which it's useful or one of
Speaker 1: those situations where it's actually just a logical red herring.
Speaker 1: So really it kind of comes back to, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: we we were talking about Sagan at the beginning of
Speaker 1: this and how he said, this is one of the
Speaker 1: tools in your skeptics tool chest. And the thing about
Speaker 1: a tool chest is that you have more than one
Speaker 1: tool in there. And the screwdriver cannot be used for everything, right,
Speaker 1: I mean, you can try. It's useful for a lot
Speaker 1: of things, uh, and certainly very useful for screws, but
Speaker 1: there's gonna be a time when you're gonna have to
Speaker 1: pull out another tool to deal with the problem. And
Speaker 1: there are gonna be plenty of cases you will encounter
Speaker 1: We're trying to use the skeptical tool of Akham's razor
Speaker 1: is like trying to clean out your electrical socket with
Speaker 1: the screwdriver. You're just it's gonna steer you astray. And
Speaker 1: I'm very sorry that in the end here we don't
Speaker 1: have like a clean rule to just guide you like
Speaker 1: this is when you can use it, this is when
Speaker 1: you can't. I think it comes down to, I mean,
Speaker 1: Sober has some useful things to say. They're about like
Speaker 1: types of situations where it is helpful. But yeah, there there,
Speaker 1: there's I'm sorry, there's not just like an easy rule
Speaker 1: of thumb for when they when the razor will be helpful. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean, ultimately, it is a tool that was not
Speaker 1: plucked out of the sky, but it was plucked out
Speaker 1: of human reasoning and uh and and human problem solving.
Speaker 1: By the way, coming back to the name of the Rose,
Speaker 1: I want to point out that there is apparently a
Speaker 1: highly regarded Spanish seven eight bit computer game based on
Speaker 1: the name of the road. Yeah, it's a it's titled
Speaker 1: The Abbey of the Crime, which was actually uh and
Speaker 1: they conceived it as an adaptation of the name of
Speaker 1: the Rose, but they were unable to secure permission to
Speaker 1: do so. And uh they in fact, I read that
Speaker 1: they didn't even hear back from Echo. They tried to
Speaker 1: get a hut of them and they couldn't get hold
Speaker 1: of it. And try to imagine the umberto Echo essay
Speaker 1: about this video game when he tries to play it,
Speaker 1: that would be good. Um, but basically the Abbey of
Speaker 1: the Crime. The title they went with was apparently like
Speaker 1: the working title for the Name of the Rose at
Speaker 1: one point. Um, so they released it under that name,
Speaker 1: and instead of having the main character be William of Baskerville,
Speaker 1: the main character is William of Alcolm and uh. And
Speaker 1: I thought that was pretty much the into it. You know,
Speaker 1: you can look up the footage of the game and all.
Speaker 1: But then I just learned for the first time this
Speaker 1: may be more common knowledge for everyone else out there. Um,
Speaker 1: there is a remake of it like they did, like
Speaker 1: a revamped version of it with improved but nicely pixelated graphics. Um,
Speaker 1: the Abbey of the Crime Extensive, which you can get
Speaker 1: on Steam. Apparently. I don't really do Steam, so I
Speaker 1: don't really know how it works. But um yeah, it's
Speaker 1: listed on there. Came out and it looks really cool,
Speaker 1: like the For instance, now the the updated sprites the
Speaker 1: little characters in the game, they look so much like
Speaker 1: the actors in the original film adaptation to the Name
Speaker 1: of Rose, Like it's a little Sean Connery and Christians Later. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't know if they got permission to use their likenesses. Um,
Speaker 1: how close. Does they have to be in eight bits?
Speaker 1: I don't know. That's that's a great question. But but
Speaker 1: my other question is just I would like to ask
Speaker 1: listeners out there have if you've played this, please let
Speaker 1: me know how it is. I'm very curious, Not that
Speaker 1: I think I will actually play it for myself, but
Speaker 1: I just I'm genuinely, genuinely interested in, uh in what
Speaker 1: a video game adaptation to the Name of the Rose is. Like.
Speaker 1: If you know the solution at the end of the book,
Speaker 1: can you automatically beat the game immediately? Like yeah? Or
Speaker 1: are there different solutions? I don't know, Uh, you know,
Speaker 1: is it a different murder each time? That would be crazy?
Speaker 1: Arrives at the abbey, speaks to the abbot immediately says
Speaker 1: I got something to lay on you. Is Acam's razor
Speaker 1: a an item that you can pick up like a
Speaker 1: plus one occoms razor that can then be employed in combat.
Speaker 1: It's like the Master Sword. Yeah, surely there is not
Speaker 1: combat in this game. I should hope not. I should
Speaker 1: hope it's just a lot of talking um Catholics. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I cast the poverty of Christ on you. Well. In
Speaker 1: the screenshot I was looking at, does look like the
Speaker 1: main character Baskerville slash. ACoM does have a pair of spectacles,
Speaker 1: but then there's like one to three there. There are
Speaker 1: multiple empty spots here, So I guess he gets other stuff.
Speaker 1: I mean, I guess various books and whatnot, some of
Speaker 1: lemon juice. Uh, and probably some cheese, some cheese where
Speaker 1: that gets like some fried cheese at some point, yeah,
Speaker 1: I think so, but mostly books, mostly books. All right,
Speaker 1: So there you have it, Acoms raisor hopefully we're able
Speaker 1: to to lay it out for you, um, you know,
Speaker 1: an explanation of what what alcomes razor is, where it
Speaker 1: came from, uh, some of the various opinions on its usefulness.
Speaker 1: You know. It's so you can take the tool, put
Speaker 1: it back into the tool chest, and know a little
Speaker 1: little bit more about it the next time you pull
Speaker 1: it out and go to use it. In the meantime,
Speaker 1: if you want to check out other episodes of Stuff
Speaker 1: to Blow your Mind, go to stuff to Blow your
Speaker 1: Mind dot com. That will shoot you over to the
Speaker 1: I heart listing for this podcast. But ultimately you can
Speaker 1: find this podcast wherever you get your podcast. We don't
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Speaker 1: These are the things that help us out huge thanks
Speaker 1: as always to our excellent audio producer, Seth Nicholas Johnson.
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