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Speaker 1: Welcome Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of I

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Speaker 1: Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey, you, welcome to Stuff

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Speaker 1: to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and

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Speaker 1: I'm Joe McCormick. Today we're going to discuss a problem

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Speaker 1: solving principle that many of you have probably heard of

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Speaker 1: and that we've we've definitely referenced on the show before,

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Speaker 1: and that is Acom's razor. That's right, it's it's one

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Speaker 1: of the classics, one of the hits of like the

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Speaker 1: skeptical tool kit. And uh, I think it's a really

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Speaker 1: good one to get into because it's something that is

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Speaker 1: widely known, but in different ways and often, uh, to

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Speaker 1: whatever extent it actually does have value, it often gets

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Speaker 1: deployed in ways that do not actually make use of

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Speaker 1: its value, right, Like like an actual razor blade, it

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Speaker 1: may be misused from time to time. Now, one specific

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Speaker 1: place that I know we've talked about it before is

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Speaker 1: that is in the context of Carl Sagan's recommend as

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Speaker 1: for the tools of skeptical thinking. Uh, he lays these

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Speaker 1: out and one of them is Okam's razor. He writes,

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Speaker 1: Okam's razor, this convenient rule of thumb urges us, when

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Speaker 1: faced with two hypotheses that explained the data equally well,

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Speaker 1: to choose the simpler. Okay, now, why did we end

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Speaker 1: up talking about this today. We were in the studio

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Speaker 1: the other day, uh, discussing upcoming episodes, and you said

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Speaker 1: that Seth had mentioned this, our our producer, Seth. Yeah.

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Speaker 1: I was in here and Seth Nicholas Johnson was working

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Speaker 1: on a crossword puzzle. Was it the New York Times?

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Speaker 1: He tells us it was the New York Times, Uh,

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Speaker 1: And he he asked me how to spell okam is

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Speaker 1: an Ockham's razor And I took a guess at it,

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Speaker 1: and I can't I can't remember I was correct. I

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Speaker 1: was probably wrong, but also probably hit one of the

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Speaker 1: multiple acceptable spellings for OCAM's razors um. But anyway, we

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Speaker 1: started talking about it and I was like, oh, yeah,

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Speaker 1: we could do that as an episode, and so here

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Speaker 1: we are. I'm very glad we picked this because I

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Speaker 1: think one of my personal favorite genres of of critical

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Speaker 1: thinking is is being skeptical about the tools of skepticism.

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Speaker 1: You know, is sometimes people who identify as skeptics can

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Speaker 1: can I get a little cocky? You know? They get

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Speaker 1: a little too sure of themselves about what the reasoning

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Speaker 1: tools they use, and it's worth putting those tools to

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Speaker 1: the test, giving them a closer look. Yeah. Absolutely, Now

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Speaker 1: I have to say that I definitely remember the first

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Speaker 1: time I encountered the concept of Ockham's Rays, or at

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Speaker 1: least the first first time I encountered it, and it

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Speaker 1: on some level stuck with me. And that was when

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Speaker 1: I view the film adaptation of Carl Sagan's novel Contact.

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Speaker 1: The movie I can't watch without crying. Oh yeah, well,

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Speaker 1: why does it make you cry? Oh god, there's part No, No,

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Speaker 1: it's just it's pointed, like especially the first part where

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Speaker 1: you know it zooms out from the earth and you're

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Speaker 1: hearing the radio signals go back in time, and then

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Speaker 1: and then it shows the young Ellie air Away experimenting

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Speaker 1: with the Ham radio and her dad's helping her, and

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Speaker 1: I get so emotional. I don't know, it's yeah, yeah,

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Speaker 1: it's it's been a very long I haven't seen it

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Speaker 1: since it initially came out, And in fact, the main

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Speaker 1: thing I remember from it is this scene in which

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Speaker 1: Jodie Foster's character Eleanor air Away has having this conversation

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Speaker 1: with Matthew McConaughey's character. Who how old was Matthew McConaughey

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Speaker 1: at this point, I don't even know how old he

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Speaker 1: is now he's just like this ageless demon. But anyway,

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Speaker 1: he has his character. He's playing his character named Palmer Joss.

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Speaker 1: And in the scene in question, Foster's character brings up

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Speaker 1: Acam's raiser in a discussion on the nature of God.

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Speaker 1: She she says, well, which is ultimately the simpler hypothesis

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Speaker 1: than an all powerful God exists, or the human beings

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Speaker 1: made God up in order to feel better about things,

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Speaker 1: and then this ultimately comes back around. Is kind of

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Speaker 1: flipped on her later on in the film regarding her

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Speaker 1: character's encounter with an extraterrestrial intelligence, Right, is it more

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Speaker 1: likely that she really had the experience she thinks she

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Speaker 1: had with with all these aliens or that she like

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Speaker 1: hallucinated something that would give her emotional clothe posure and so, yeah,

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Speaker 1: I think I was in high school at the time,

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Speaker 1: so it was It was an interesting concept, especially in

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Speaker 1: the context of atheism versus you know, faith in a

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Speaker 1: creator deity. Uh, to to suddenly have this tool from

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Speaker 1: the chest of skeptical thinking just thrown up on the

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Speaker 1: table and you and seemingly used by both sides. Well, yeah,

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Speaker 1: I think this is funny. This is a great example

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Speaker 1: because it highlights some of the most common features of

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Speaker 1: Acam's razor as it is actually used, Like it's often

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Speaker 1: invoked in a kind of fuzzy way, like without an

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Speaker 1: objective measure. Uh, just kind of invoked to back up

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Speaker 1: your intuitions about the probability of something. Right. But another

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Speaker 1: thing is that this example shows how it's not always

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Speaker 1: easy to find a way to compare the simplicity of

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Speaker 1: two different propositions, like is the existence of God a

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Speaker 1: simple hypothesis or a complicated one? That I think that

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Speaker 1: really depends on kind of how you feel about it, Like,

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Speaker 1: like what kind of objective measure can you come up

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Speaker 1: with to a vow evaluate that question? Right, It's going

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Speaker 1: to depend so much on your like your background, your culture,

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Speaker 1: what you grew up with than just like how you

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Speaker 1: how you've come to view the possibility of of of

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Speaker 1: God's existence. Is it just kind of the bedrock of

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Speaker 1: your your worldview or is it this thing from the

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Speaker 1: outside that you are contemplating? And also how do you

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Speaker 1: view it, Like the coherence of the idea. Do you

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Speaker 1: view it as something that's like, uh, that's full of

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Speaker 1: all these little kind of ad hoc accommodations, or something

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Speaker 1: that is a holistic, coherent sort of like fact about nature.

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Speaker 1: You know, it's I think this is a perfect example

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Speaker 1: that shows like when people use the idea of Acam's

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Speaker 1: razor in a way that is not helpful and doesn't

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Speaker 1: really doesn't really get you any closer to figuring out

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Speaker 1: what's true. Now, if you're one, If if you're still

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Speaker 1: questioning like what the concept really means, don't worry. We

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Speaker 1: will get to some I think some some very understandable

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Speaker 1: examples of how it can be used properly and used improperly.

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Speaker 1: But let's go ahead and to start about the concept

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Speaker 1: itself the word acum uh and you know where this

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Speaker 1: comes from. We'll get to the origins of Akam's razor. So,

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Speaker 1: Acam's razor is also known as the principle of parsimony,

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Speaker 1: and parsimony means a tendency toward cheapness or frugality. So

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Speaker 1: I like that. It's like the principle of parsimony is

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Speaker 1: like you want to be cheap with your with your logic, right, Yeah,

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Speaker 1: I don't need more than two steps of logic between

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Speaker 1: me and the solution. Uh, you know, don't give me

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Speaker 1: one with four or five. Uh. And it was named

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Speaker 1: after the medieval English philosopher William of Ockham, of course,

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Speaker 1: William of Ockum. Uh so he he lived in the

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Speaker 1: thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, from twelve eighty five to either

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Speaker 1: thirteen forty seven or thirteen forty nine. I've seen different

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Speaker 1: death dates given for him. I've seen different birthdates as well,

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Speaker 1: twelve eighty seven or twelve eighty eight. What I was

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Speaker 1: looking at. That's interesting. So he was a prolific scholar,

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Speaker 1: Franciscan friar. We'll get more into his ideas in a minute.

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Speaker 1: You know, one thing I've always wondered is where the

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Speaker 1: heck is ACoM. I've never heard of that. Well, yeah,

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Speaker 1: because the words sound it has kind of like a

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Speaker 1: remoteness to it. It sounds alien in some ways. Akom

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Speaker 1: is very much a real place. It is a rural

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Speaker 1: village in Surrey, England. You can look it up online.

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Speaker 1: You can find out the website for the church in Ockham,

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Speaker 1: for example. And this area has been occupied since ancient times.

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Speaker 1: It's about a day's ride southwest of London, and it

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Speaker 1: was the birthplace of the individual who had come to

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Speaker 1: be known as William of Ockham. Now beyond that, beyond

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Speaker 1: the fact that he was born here, we don't know

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Speaker 1: a lot about William's life. Uh, we don't know what

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Speaker 1: his social or family background was, or if his native

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Speaker 1: language was French or Middle English. As Paul Vincent Spade

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Speaker 1: explains in The Cambridge Companion to Ockum, he was likely

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Speaker 1: given over to the Franciscan Order as a young boy

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Speaker 1: before the age of fourteen, and here Latin would have

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Speaker 1: quickly become his language of of of not only writing,

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Speaker 1: it also just conversation. Gray Friar's convent in London was

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Speaker 1: likely his home convent, but later he traveled. He visited Avignon,

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Speaker 1: he visited Italy, and he lived the last two decades

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Speaker 1: of his life in Germany. Now, philosophically, William was a nominalist,

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Speaker 1: and Spade writes that the two main themes of this

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Speaker 1: for William were the rejection of universals and ontological reduction.

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Speaker 1: And these two themes are are not necessarily interconnected. Like

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Speaker 1: you can you could you could believe in one but

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Speaker 1: not the other, you know, and vice versa. Um. But basically,

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Speaker 1: let's let's get into what these means. So the first,

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Speaker 1: the rejection of universals is perhaps best considered and and

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Speaker 1: this is very brief and broad certainly you can find

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Speaker 1: so much written and said on this topic. But basically,

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Speaker 1: think of it as a rejection of the Platonic idea

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Speaker 1: of the realm of forms. So that idea that all

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Speaker 1: chairs that we might make, the wom I design and

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Speaker 1: call are of an a symbol, are an attempt to

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Speaker 1: create the perfect chair, which doesn't reside in our world,

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Speaker 1: but only resides within this realm of forms. So all

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Speaker 1: chairs that we create are like an aspiration for the

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Speaker 1: ideal chair. Another way I've thought about it, at least

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Speaker 1: as I understood it, was that nominalism is kind of

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Speaker 1: the idea that there is no such thing as a chair.

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Speaker 1: There's only this chair and that chair, and this chair

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Speaker 1: over here. There is no chair right like this is.

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Speaker 1: This is the kind of the situation. One gets it

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Speaker 1: too when you you get into like the genre classifications

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Speaker 1: of say albums, artists, or movies that you care a

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Speaker 1: great deal about, and someone tries to limit it to

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Speaker 1: a classification and say, oh, well that's classic rock or

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Speaker 1: that's alternative rock. And you're like no, no, no, no, no,

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Speaker 1: you don't. Don't try and fit that. There is there is.

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Speaker 1: These categories do not apply. There is. There is only

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Speaker 1: you know, whatever your band of choice happens to be. That,

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Speaker 1: there is only tool, there is only primus or whatever.

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Speaker 1: Right there, Yeah, there there is only things, not categories.

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Speaker 1: Now let's move on to the second theme here, ontological reduction.

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Speaker 1: This is, as Britannica defines it, quote, the metaphysical doctrine

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Speaker 1: that entities of a certain kind are, in reality collections

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Speaker 1: or combinations of entities of simpler or more basic kind.

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Speaker 1: I think your classic example here is molecules atoms. Yeah.

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Speaker 1: So another example, here's while our Aristotle defined ten categories

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Speaker 1: of objects that might be apprehended by a human mind,

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Speaker 1: and these would have been uh translations, vary on on

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Speaker 1: on how you wanted define these. But substance, quantity, quality,

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Speaker 1: relative place, time, attitude, condition, action, and affection. William cut

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Speaker 1: these down to two. Substance and quality. He's really getting

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Speaker 1: in there. That's the razor. That's what a razor does.

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Speaker 1: It just it slices away, it cuts off the fat

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Speaker 1: and gets down to the meat. Spade writes, quote. Although

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Speaker 1: these two strands of Acam's thinking are independent, they are

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Speaker 1: nevertheless often viewed as joint effects of a more fundamental cern,

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Speaker 1: the principle of parsimony, known as Akam's razor. Okay, so

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Speaker 1: we're getting to the razor here. So William devoted a

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Speaker 1: lot of energy to arguing against what Spade calls the

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Speaker 1: bloated ontological inventories of his contemporaries, and he became well

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Speaker 1: known to his peers for this as such. Either towards

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Speaker 1: the end of his life or shortly after his death,

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Speaker 1: a kind of greatest hits album came out on his

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Speaker 1: thoughts and ideas, titled on the Principles of Theology. Now

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Speaker 1: it wasn't actually by William of Ockham, but it featured

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Speaker 1: his doctrine as well as verbatim quotes. There was no

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Speaker 1: ascribed author either, so later generations would often just attribute

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Speaker 1: it to him um as well as the notion of

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Speaker 1: Acam's razor. Uh. However, this specific phrase was apparently never

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Speaker 1: actually used by him. He never said, Ackam in the house,

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Speaker 1: I'm going to get the razor out and start carving

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Speaker 1: on some uh, some some some some ideas here. No,

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Speaker 1: this is something that is attributed by others to his work. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: Okam's razor is a is a name for this principle

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Speaker 1: that is supposed to be kind of a summation of

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Speaker 1: several different thoughts he articulated in different ways. Yes, yeah,

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Speaker 1: he summed it up in different different manners in Spain.

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Speaker 1: Includes includes a few examples of this in his work.

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Speaker 1: For instance, here's here's some quotes from Akam. Beings are

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Speaker 1: not to be multiplied beyond necessity or plurality is not

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Speaker 1: to be posited without necessity, or what can happen through

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Speaker 1: fewer principles happens in vain through more and there are

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Speaker 1: other There are other examples of this as well. We're

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Speaker 1: basically saying the same thing, but maybe like it just

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Speaker 1: comes off a little flower, at least in translations. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: I think the the simple version you could get to

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Speaker 1: the summarizing some of his abuse here, like, uh, don't

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Speaker 1: make assumptions you don't have to, don't pile on explanations

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Speaker 1: that are not necessary. Yeah, and also just don't take

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Speaker 1: more steps that are necessary to get from point A

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Speaker 1: to point B in your reasoning. And in your hypothesis.

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Speaker 1: And the way this usually gets translated into modern thinking,

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Speaker 1: as we've talked about before, is that when you've got

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Speaker 1: competing explanations, it's better to tend towards the simpler one,

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Speaker 1: the one that makes fewer assumptions, rather than the more

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Speaker 1: complicated one that makes more assumptions. Now here's another fun

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Speaker 1: fact about William of Ackom. William Ackom is key to

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Speaker 1: Elmberto Echo's excellent novel The Name of the Rose Yep.

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Speaker 1: This was a novel that was published in nineteen eighty.

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Speaker 1: Many of you may be familiar with the certainly the

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Speaker 1: the film adaptation that started Sean Connery, f Murray, Abraham Um,

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Speaker 1: Christian Slater in a host of wonderful character actors. And

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Speaker 1: then there was there's a more recent mini series adaptation

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Speaker 1: with John Taturo that I have not seen, but I

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Speaker 1: should probably see at some point or another. But anyway,

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Speaker 1: the main character in Echoes novel is William of Baskerville,

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Speaker 1: who is in many ways similar. He's a Franciscan friar.

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Speaker 1: He's got a kind of empirical streak. Yeah, he's basically

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Speaker 1: a mash up of William of Ockham and Sherlock Holmes.

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Speaker 1: Thus the Baskerville alluding to uh Hound of the Baskerville's

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Speaker 1: and the title itself. The Name of the Rose has

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Speaker 1: has been interpreted as being a reference to Acom's uh nominalism.

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Speaker 1: There is no one rose. There is only the Name

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Speaker 1: of the Rose. But there are also other, I think

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Speaker 1: interpretations on it, and it's meant to be kind of cryptic.

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Speaker 1: Now according to I was reading more about this, and

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Speaker 1: it's been been a little while since I've read In

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Speaker 1: the Name of the Rose. You've read it more recently

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Speaker 1: than yes, because we were misremembering. We were thinking, now,

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Speaker 1: was it was the Was it the case in the

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Speaker 1: book that William of Ockham was supposed to be this

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Speaker 1: fictional main character's mentor. I somehow had that in my

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Speaker 1: mind as well. No, Instead it was another medieval scholastic thinker.

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Speaker 1: It was Roger Bacon. Yes, so so yes, Roger Bacon

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Speaker 1: was William of Baskerville's mentor, as opposed to William of Acham,

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Speaker 1: who I do not believe as Ackam is actually mentioned

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Speaker 1: in the novel. So I was reading a little bit

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Speaker 1: more about this. There was a two thousand eighteen article

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Speaker 1: that came out in Philosophy now by Carol Nicholson, titled

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Speaker 1: Acom's Rose, and she pointed out that Echo had apparently

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Speaker 1: explored the possibility of simply using ACoM as his main

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Speaker 1: character in in this novel, but he ultimately quote did

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Speaker 1: not find him a very attractive person. And therefore, I mean,

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Speaker 1: did that makes sense right? If you're it's like, you

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Speaker 1: can either lean on a historical figure, or he can

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Speaker 1: do something a little more fun and do a mash

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Speaker 1: up of Acum and the great Detective And ultimately, I

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Speaker 1: mean that's one of the fun things about the novel

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Speaker 1: is that is that you do have these elements where

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Speaker 1: it's a it's Sherlock Holmes going up against bores, you know,

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Speaker 1: that kind of sort of thing. She writes, Uh, this

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Speaker 1: is interesting as well, just to draw the parallel between

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Speaker 1: William of Baskerville and William of of of ACoM, She writes, Quote.

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Speaker 1: In thirty seven, the year in which the name of

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Speaker 1: the Rose is set, ACoM faced fifty six charges of

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Speaker 1: harris and was excommunicated after escaping the protection of Emperor

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Speaker 1: Louis of Bavaria. This put an end to his academic career,

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Speaker 1: and he spent the rest of his life as a

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Speaker 1: political activists, advocating freedom of speech, the separation of church

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Speaker 1: and state, and arguing against the infallibility of the pope.

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Speaker 1: She also points out that Acham, like the fictional William

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Speaker 1: of Baskerville, likely died of the plague. Alright, on that note,

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Speaker 1: we're going to take a quick break, but when we

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Speaker 1: come back, we will continue our discussion of Okam's razor.

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Speaker 1: Thank alright, we're back, all right. So we've been talking

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Speaker 1: about this principle known as Akam's razor that we've described

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Speaker 1: already as the idea that simpler hypotheses are better than

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Speaker 1: more complex hypotheses. There are a number of ways you

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Speaker 1: can formulate it, but it's a principle that's been referred

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Speaker 1: back to actually since probably before William of Acam. It

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Speaker 1: it is, i think, a principle that somewhat predates him

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Speaker 1: in intellectual history, right right. He did not he did

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Speaker 1: not create something that was not already um utilized by

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Speaker 1: other thing ancres of the day and thinkers before him.

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Speaker 1: One great example of somebody not before William Avacham but

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Speaker 1: later articulating similar ideas is Isaac Newton, in his great

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Speaker 1: work The Principia Mathematica from seven, Newton writes, quote, we

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Speaker 1: are to admit no more causes of natural things than

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Speaker 1: such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances.

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Speaker 1: Uh So a similar ideas, there's no need to add

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Speaker 1: extra explanations when you already have an explanation that is

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Speaker 1: number one true and number two explains everything you see.

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Speaker 1: So an example of this might be why do the

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Speaker 1: planets orbit the Sun? This would be something that Newton

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Speaker 1: would be concerned with. Newton would say, okay, we know

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Speaker 1: of two forces that explain what we see, gravity and inertia.

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Speaker 1: Inertia is the tendency of an object in motion to

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Speaker 1: stay in motion. Gravity is the mutually attracting force between

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Speaker 1: two objects with mass. So, because of inertia, the planets

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Speaker 1: flying through space want to keep traveling in a straight

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Speaker 1: line at a constant speed. And because of gravity, instead

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Speaker 1: of traveling in a straight line, their path bends around

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Speaker 1: towards the Sun as they travel. And so that those

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Speaker 1: two things are both true and they explain everything we observe,

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Speaker 1: not now actually not quite everything, but they were good

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Speaker 1: enough for Newton's time explaining everything. You might also say, though,

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Speaker 1: that maybe in addition to gravity and inertia, there are

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Speaker 1: angels that guide the planets in their orbits because those

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Speaker 1: elliptical pathways are pleasing to the Lord. But if somebody

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Speaker 1: proposes that you're you're kind of stuck because there's no

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Speaker 1: way to prove the angel hypothesis wrong. You can't say

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Speaker 1: there aren't invisible angels guiding the planets. But pretty much

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Speaker 1: everybody today, I think, even people who believe in angels

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Speaker 1: in some sense, would not see any reason to believe

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Speaker 1: that there are angels doing that because there are other

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Speaker 1: explanations which do all the explaining that needs to be done. Right. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: I mean once you drag angels into it too, it

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Speaker 1: it opens up the or for just a never ending

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Speaker 1: list of reasons why the angels can't be detected or

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Speaker 1: why the you know, well, why the angel wanted, why

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Speaker 1: the planet seems to be behaving this way. It's in

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Speaker 1: accordance with these known laws rather than the machinations of

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Speaker 1: a divine being right, and you don't need to appeal

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Speaker 1: in any way to the additional plausibility of angels or not.

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Speaker 1: Like the reason I said that even people who otherwise

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Speaker 1: believe in angels don't say that they're guiding the motions

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Speaker 1: of the planets is you don't need them to explain that.

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Speaker 1: You've just got basic laws of physics that explain what

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Speaker 1: the planets are doing. There's no reason to add an

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Speaker 1: angel's explanation. It doesn't do anymore work. Yeah, it doesn't

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Speaker 1: even help angels out right, No, I mean, yeah, it's there.

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Speaker 1: There's just no point in it now. Of course, sticking

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Speaker 1: on the theory of like the motions of the planets

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Speaker 1: for a minute, of course, we would have to later

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Speaker 1: come up with a more refined theory of gravity for

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Speaker 1: those rare cases where Newton's theory of gravity would fail,

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Speaker 1: and we would get that with Einstein and general relativity,

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Speaker 1: which recharacterized gravity is the curvature of space time caused

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Speaker 1: by deformation due to mass, rather than as a mutually

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Speaker 1: attractive force between objects. Though in most cases if you

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Speaker 1: think of it as a force in in the Newtonian sense,

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Speaker 1: your predictions work out just fine. But from an article

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Speaker 1: that I want to refer to later by a philosopher

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Speaker 1: named Elliott sober Uh, he writes, quote Albert Einstein spoke

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Speaker 1: for many when he said quote, it can scarcely be

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Speaker 1: denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to

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Speaker 1: make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few

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Speaker 1: as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of

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Speaker 1: a single datum of experience, which in a way is

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Speaker 1: again articulating something like Ockham's razor. It's saying like, you

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Speaker 1: want the simplest possible explanation that explains everything. And if

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Speaker 1: we're sticking with Einstein for a minute, to go beyond

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Speaker 1: positing something like angels, if if you want to go

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Speaker 1: into real scientific hypotheses in history, there are all kinds

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Speaker 1: of things that you might argue we're sort of done

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Speaker 1: away with by an Occam's razor issue kind of process.

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Speaker 1: Though I think there are some historians and philosophers of

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Speaker 1: science that might disagree there. But one example that comes

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Speaker 1: to my mind is the luminiferous ether. You know, it

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Speaker 1: was once believed by many scientists that there had to

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Speaker 1: be a medium in space through which light propagates, right,

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Speaker 1: the same way that if you want sound to propagate,

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Speaker 1: there's no sound in space, right, You've got to have

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Speaker 1: sound traveling through a medium like air, or like water,

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Speaker 1: or like a you know, like a steel wire. There

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Speaker 1: must be matter to transmit that energy, and so the

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Speaker 1: idea was that space was filled with this stuff, this ether,

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Speaker 1: that light waves propagated through. And eventually, due to Einstein

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Speaker 1: and to other thinkers and experiments it it started to

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Speaker 1: become clear that the ether was superfluous. You didn't need

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Speaker 1: it to explain any of the properties of light. Now,

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Speaker 1: there's another example from history that often comes up when

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Speaker 1: people talk about Okam's razor. It's often brought up as

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Speaker 1: a great example of Akam's razor being applied. But we're

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Speaker 1: gonna get to an article later on that I think

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Speaker 1: has presents a pretty devastating case against this being true.

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Speaker 1: But just to set it up here, it is the

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Speaker 1: idea of comparing the Ptolemaic universe versus the Copernican universe, which,

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Speaker 1: obviously this argument was brought to a very dramatic end

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Speaker 1: UH in the life of Galileo, Right Galileo got into

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Speaker 1: big trouble with the Inquisition for, among other things, they

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Speaker 1: were also politics involved, but for among other things, advocating

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Speaker 1: the Copernican model over the Ptolemaic model. UH. For simplicity's sake,

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Speaker 1: the Copernican model of the Solar system was of course,

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Speaker 1: the one we know to be more basically correct, not

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Speaker 1: totally correct, but more correct because it was helio centric.

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Speaker 1: It put the Sun at the center of the Solar

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Speaker 1: system and argued that the other planets, including the Earth,

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Speaker 1: all rotated around the Sun. Uh. This, of course was

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Speaker 1: not the orthodox astronomy of the day. The more favored

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Speaker 1: models were the traditional Totolemaic model, which had the Earth

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Speaker 1: at the center and the the planets all going around

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Speaker 1: the Earth, and these strange kind of spirograph patterns that

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Speaker 1: had these things called epicycles where they would sort of

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Speaker 1: stop and then do a circle and another circle, and

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Speaker 1: like loops within their their traveling um And then you

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Speaker 1: had some compromise models like the model of Tycho Brahy. Now,

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Speaker 1: the traditional argument here in favor of saying, you know,

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Speaker 1: Copernicus and Galileo were on the side of Acam's razor,

425
00:23:20,040 --> 00:23:23,679
Speaker 1: it would go something like, well, the Ttolemaic system and

426
00:23:23,720 --> 00:23:26,359
Speaker 1: the and the Tycho Brahy models, they've got all this

427
00:23:26,560 --> 00:23:30,399
Speaker 1: extra stuff. You need to assume, all these weird extra assumptions,

428
00:23:30,440 --> 00:23:33,840
Speaker 1: like like epicycles, you know, like where the planets are

429
00:23:33,840 --> 00:23:36,400
Speaker 1: going around in loops, and it's not explained exactly why

430
00:23:36,440 --> 00:23:38,840
Speaker 1: they're doing that. You just have to insert the loops

431
00:23:39,160 --> 00:23:42,439
Speaker 1: in order to make it match our x are our observations,

432
00:23:42,720 --> 00:23:46,480
Speaker 1: and therefore the Tlemaic model was more complex. We'll come

433
00:23:46,480 --> 00:23:49,160
Speaker 1: back to that later on, because I think now it's

434
00:23:49,320 --> 00:23:52,760
Speaker 1: going to be important to get into some criticisms of

435
00:23:52,760 --> 00:23:55,800
Speaker 1: acams razor. You know, if you go into especially a

436
00:23:55,800 --> 00:23:58,440
Speaker 1: lot of like kind of skeptic communities on the Internet,

437
00:23:59,000 --> 00:24:02,600
Speaker 1: you might sometimes people treating Occam's razor as if it

438
00:24:02,840 --> 00:24:06,399
Speaker 1: is some kind of law of nature, like referring to

439
00:24:06,440 --> 00:24:08,800
Speaker 1: Ockham's razor in the same way you might refer to

440
00:24:09,000 --> 00:24:13,560
Speaker 1: proven theories about reality, such as, you know, the equations

441
00:24:13,560 --> 00:24:16,840
Speaker 1: describing the action of gravity or something. Uh. And so

442
00:24:17,040 --> 00:24:19,600
Speaker 1: I think while Ockham's razor is an interesting and sometimes

443
00:24:19,720 --> 00:24:23,400
Speaker 1: useful skeptical lens to apply, it is not in fact

444
00:24:23,480 --> 00:24:25,240
Speaker 1: a law of nature. And then there are a couple

445
00:24:25,280 --> 00:24:29,240
Speaker 1: of major branches of criticisms of ye old razor. I

446
00:24:29,280 --> 00:24:32,479
Speaker 1: think the first would be like accusations that it is

447
00:24:32,520 --> 00:24:36,359
Speaker 1: often misunderstood or misused, And then second there would be

448
00:24:36,400 --> 00:24:39,480
Speaker 1: actual attacks on the usefulness of the razor even when

449
00:24:39,520 --> 00:24:42,560
Speaker 1: it is in its supposedly true form. Now, the first

450
00:24:42,560 --> 00:24:44,480
Speaker 1: thing would be pretty simple, and it's just the idea

451
00:24:44,520 --> 00:24:50,280
Speaker 1: that Ockham's razor is misunderstood, misquoted, misconstrued, misused. Uh. I

452
00:24:50,320 --> 00:24:52,840
Speaker 1: actually I came across a funny blog post that, of

453
00:24:52,840 --> 00:24:55,359
Speaker 1: all things, pointed to a quote from a mystery writer

454
00:24:56,000 --> 00:25:00,840
Speaker 1: named Harlan Coben. Uh my writers, yeah, uh yeah, I'm

455
00:25:00,880 --> 00:25:03,400
Speaker 1: not familiar with this writer, but I thought this was interesting.

456
00:25:03,480 --> 00:25:05,439
Speaker 1: This would you know? It was just an example of

457
00:25:05,440 --> 00:25:08,600
Speaker 1: somebody saying, no, you're not using Ockham's razor. Right, This

458
00:25:08,640 --> 00:25:12,160
Speaker 1: writer wrote quote, most people oversimplify Okham's razor to mean

459
00:25:12,200 --> 00:25:15,480
Speaker 1: the simplest answer is usually correct, but the real meaning

460
00:25:15,520 --> 00:25:19,199
Speaker 1: what the Franciscan Friar William Ovakan really wanted to emphasize

461
00:25:19,400 --> 00:25:22,919
Speaker 1: is that you shouldn't complicate, that you shouldn't stack a theory.

462
00:25:23,280 --> 00:25:26,879
Speaker 1: If a simpler explanation was at the ready, pare it down,

463
00:25:27,160 --> 00:25:30,439
Speaker 1: prune the excess. And so I think looking at it

464
00:25:30,480 --> 00:25:33,320
Speaker 1: this way, this fits more with like the the version

465
00:25:33,400 --> 00:25:36,120
Speaker 1: that we were talking about with Isaac Newton. Right, it's

466
00:25:36,160 --> 00:25:39,840
Speaker 1: not necessarily a statement about simplicity as a general principle,

467
00:25:40,160 --> 00:25:43,840
Speaker 1: but saying that you shouldn't stack things that explain the

468
00:25:43,880 --> 00:25:47,120
Speaker 1: same outcomes on top of each other, because you get

469
00:25:47,160 --> 00:25:51,320
Speaker 1: no extra usefulness out of that. Another example that I

470
00:25:51,400 --> 00:25:53,040
Speaker 1: was just thinking of that's come up on the show

471
00:25:53,080 --> 00:25:56,360
Speaker 1: before is the idea of aquatic ape theory. Oh. Yes,

472
00:25:56,440 --> 00:25:59,960
Speaker 1: this is the idea that, among other things, humans are

473
00:26:00,040 --> 00:26:05,280
Speaker 1: hairless because for a while, our our ancestors lived at

474
00:26:05,320 --> 00:26:07,920
Speaker 1: least partially in the water. Yeah. The ideas you look

475
00:26:07,920 --> 00:26:11,240
Speaker 1: at a lot of our body features are relatively smooth skin,

476
00:26:11,760 --> 00:26:16,359
Speaker 1: bipedalis um, layers of subcutaneous fat, uh, the abilities of

477
00:26:16,359 --> 00:26:19,399
Speaker 1: our vocal cords, all kinds of things like that. The

478
00:26:19,440 --> 00:26:22,800
Speaker 1: proponents of aquatic ape theory say, hey, we've got all

479
00:26:22,800 --> 00:26:26,480
Speaker 1: these strange anatomical morphological features that are not the same

480
00:26:26,520 --> 00:26:29,320
Speaker 1: as other great apes. Why do we have those qualities?

481
00:26:29,600 --> 00:26:32,440
Speaker 1: I think you could explain them all if humans once

482
00:26:32,560 --> 00:26:34,399
Speaker 1: needed to be in the water, so they needed to

483
00:26:34,400 --> 00:26:37,240
Speaker 1: be smooth. You have smooth skin in order to be

484
00:26:37,280 --> 00:26:41,000
Speaker 1: aerodynamic swimmers, and they became bipedal so that they could

485
00:26:41,040 --> 00:26:42,920
Speaker 1: wade around in the water. And you come up with

486
00:26:42,960 --> 00:26:45,880
Speaker 1: a list of explanations along these lines that they would

487
00:26:45,960 --> 00:26:48,879
Speaker 1: argue all point to an aquatic ancestry. But there's a

488
00:26:48,880 --> 00:26:52,119
Speaker 1: wrinkle there because of course, if that's all true, the

489
00:26:52,240 --> 00:26:55,440
Speaker 1: question is, then why did we retain all those features

490
00:26:55,480 --> 00:26:57,600
Speaker 1: after leaving the water? You know, humans are not an

491
00:26:57,600 --> 00:26:59,960
Speaker 1: aquatic species now, I mean, we can go into the water,

492
00:27:00,160 --> 00:27:04,399
Speaker 1: but water is not our primary environmental niche so what

493
00:27:04,560 --> 00:27:07,320
Speaker 1: you know, how can we still have all those features?

494
00:27:07,440 --> 00:27:10,520
Speaker 1: And the the aquatic ape theorists might say, oh, well,

495
00:27:10,600 --> 00:27:13,240
Speaker 1: once you came onto the land, it actually was useful

496
00:27:13,280 --> 00:27:15,560
Speaker 1: to be bipedal for these other reasons, and which is

497
00:27:15,720 --> 00:27:18,120
Speaker 1: useful to be hairless for these other reasons, which then

498
00:27:18,160 --> 00:27:20,520
Speaker 1: means you could cut out that entire step of having

499
00:27:20,560 --> 00:27:22,400
Speaker 1: to be in the water to stick with these are

500
00:27:22,480 --> 00:27:24,800
Speaker 1: useful for living on the land exactly. You might apply

501
00:27:24,920 --> 00:27:27,199
Speaker 1: Akham here and say, if those features turn out to

502
00:27:27,200 --> 00:27:30,159
Speaker 1: be useful on land, why wouldn't they just evolve on

503
00:27:30,240 --> 00:27:32,880
Speaker 1: land in the first place? Right, So there is like

504
00:27:32,920 --> 00:27:36,800
Speaker 1: you've you've you've end up then creating or redirecting to

505
00:27:37,040 --> 00:27:41,080
Speaker 1: the hypothesis that is one enormous step shorter. Yeah, And

506
00:27:41,119 --> 00:27:43,400
Speaker 1: so aquatic ape theory, I think is one of those

507
00:27:43,400 --> 00:27:47,359
Speaker 1: things that like it would be hard to completely disprove.

508
00:27:47,440 --> 00:27:50,920
Speaker 1: I think that there is no physical evidence pointing toward it.

509
00:27:50,920 --> 00:27:53,600
Speaker 1: It would be hard to say this is impossible to

510
00:27:53,760 --> 00:27:56,640
Speaker 1: have happened, but there's just no reason to assume it.

511
00:27:56,640 --> 00:27:59,040
Speaker 1: It just it just like adds in an extra step

512
00:27:59,080 --> 00:28:02,720
Speaker 1: of explanations that don't explain anything any better than other

513
00:28:02,800 --> 00:28:05,520
Speaker 1: explanations could. Yeah. I mean, it's kind of like if

514
00:28:05,560 --> 00:28:09,160
Speaker 1: I come home from work and I have, say, beer

515
00:28:09,240 --> 00:28:12,639
Speaker 1: and bread. Uh, maybe I stopped at two places to

516
00:28:12,680 --> 00:28:14,040
Speaker 1: get the beer in the bread. I got the beer

517
00:28:14,040 --> 00:28:15,840
Speaker 1: in one place and the bread of the other, But

518
00:28:15,920 --> 00:28:18,280
Speaker 1: I also probably just stopped at one store to get

519
00:28:18,280 --> 00:28:21,480
Speaker 1: both of them. Both are likely one is a shorter trip.

520
00:28:21,680 --> 00:28:23,359
Speaker 1: I feel like you would also have to add in

521
00:28:23,480 --> 00:28:25,960
Speaker 1: something it kind of extravagant. That would be like you

522
00:28:26,000 --> 00:28:29,000
Speaker 1: stopped at the way home and you entered a raffle

523
00:28:29,080 --> 00:28:32,679
Speaker 1: contest in which you one beer and bread. Uh, And

524
00:28:32,720 --> 00:28:35,359
Speaker 1: then you also may have stopped at the store, you know,

525
00:28:35,480 --> 00:28:37,520
Speaker 1: to get something else, but like right, yeah, where I

526
00:28:37,520 --> 00:28:40,120
Speaker 1: stole beer and bread? As like when the simple explanation

527
00:28:40,160 --> 00:28:42,720
Speaker 1: is probably probably just bought beer and bread, or beer

528
00:28:42,720 --> 00:28:45,240
Speaker 1: and bread was was placed in my car by a

529
00:28:45,280 --> 00:28:48,240
Speaker 1: mysterious stranger. Like these are all things that are possible

530
00:28:48,760 --> 00:28:52,160
Speaker 1: and could conceivably be the reason that I have beer

531
00:28:52,160 --> 00:28:57,120
Speaker 1: and bread in the car, but Acam's razor slices away

532
00:28:57,160 --> 00:29:01,800
Speaker 1: the unnecessary steps, the less likely step for the shorter

533
00:29:01,880 --> 00:29:04,360
Speaker 1: trip between point and point B. Right. And I think

534
00:29:04,360 --> 00:29:06,880
Speaker 1: in cases like that, you could say that docums raiser

535
00:29:06,920 --> 00:29:10,840
Speaker 1: doesn't necessarily prove a theory wrong, but it is kind

536
00:29:10,880 --> 00:29:14,440
Speaker 1: of a useful heuristic. It might help you, uh use

537
00:29:14,480 --> 00:29:18,480
Speaker 1: your intellectual time wisely. Right. Uh. But and and that

538
00:29:18,520 --> 00:29:20,920
Speaker 1: gets us to the next step, which is the more

539
00:29:20,960 --> 00:29:24,640
Speaker 1: comprehensive criticism, the idea that acum is maybe in fact

540
00:29:24,680 --> 00:29:27,680
Speaker 1: wrong or not useful. I think in some cases this

541
00:29:27,760 --> 00:29:30,200
Speaker 1: criticism is true, so maybe we should get into it

542
00:29:30,240 --> 00:29:32,440
Speaker 1: a bit. The first article I wanted to look at

543
00:29:32,840 --> 00:29:35,960
Speaker 1: is called The Tyranny of Simple Explanations, and it was

544
00:29:36,000 --> 00:29:39,040
Speaker 1: published in the Atlantic. It was written by the science

545
00:29:39,040 --> 00:29:41,719
Speaker 1: writer Philip Ball, one of my favorite current science writers,

546
00:29:41,720 --> 00:29:45,280
Speaker 1: who wrote the book Beyond Weird, a really fantastic book

547
00:29:45,280 --> 00:29:48,040
Speaker 1: about quantum physics that I recommended last summer. This is

548
00:29:48,040 --> 00:29:50,240
Speaker 1: one of your summer reading picks. I think, yeah, it's

549
00:29:50,280 --> 00:29:52,720
Speaker 1: really good. It's one of those books that you may

550
00:29:52,760 --> 00:29:54,720
Speaker 1: think you already you know, you've already read a quantum

551
00:29:54,760 --> 00:29:56,880
Speaker 1: physics book. You know, you know the basics, you know,

552
00:29:57,040 --> 00:29:59,440
Speaker 1: you know the the what the interpretations are, and all

553
00:29:59,440 --> 00:30:01,720
Speaker 1: that I've like, this is one you can still be

554
00:30:01,840 --> 00:30:04,920
Speaker 1: newly amazed by and learn a lot more from right

555
00:30:05,160 --> 00:30:08,000
Speaker 1: and true form. As a great science writer, Ball I

556
00:30:08,000 --> 00:30:12,120
Speaker 1: think makes a fantastic case in this article against Stockholm's razor,

557
00:30:12,240 --> 00:30:15,760
Speaker 1: against you know, a liberal use of it. So he

558
00:30:15,800 --> 00:30:18,680
Speaker 1: starts by saying, quote, Okham's razor is often stated as

559
00:30:18,720 --> 00:30:22,560
Speaker 1: an injunction not to make more assumptions than you absolutely need.

560
00:30:23,040 --> 00:30:26,440
Speaker 1: And in that way, it's almost a truism, right, I mean,

561
00:30:26,520 --> 00:30:30,520
Speaker 1: like when when you phrase it that way, who would say, well, yeah, no,

562
00:30:30,680 --> 00:30:34,040
Speaker 1: I want to make more assumptions than I need. Yeah,

563
00:30:34,080 --> 00:30:37,520
Speaker 1: I mean you can come back to like a forensic example, right,

564
00:30:38,400 --> 00:30:42,280
Speaker 1: detective work which even Carl Sagan makes a discusses this

565
00:30:42,360 --> 00:30:45,120
Speaker 1: a lot like comparing science to uh to the work

566
00:30:45,120 --> 00:30:49,000
Speaker 1: of a detective, Like how many hypotheses do you need

567
00:30:49,120 --> 00:30:52,560
Speaker 1: for a murder? Right? And you know there's gonna You're

568
00:30:52,600 --> 00:30:55,720
Speaker 1: gonna be the obvious ones that you know, especially the

569
00:30:55,760 --> 00:30:58,240
Speaker 1: Ockham's razor, are going to be the primary candidates that

570
00:30:58,320 --> 00:31:01,080
Speaker 1: it was someone the victim knew that it was, like

571
00:31:01,120 --> 00:31:05,400
Speaker 1: a spouse or a friend, etcetera. Uh, rather than inventing

572
00:31:05,400 --> 00:31:08,640
Speaker 1: wild scenarios with no evidence to base them on, right, saying,

573
00:31:08,720 --> 00:31:11,680
Speaker 1: you know, certainly getting into possible scenarios like maybe it

574
00:31:11,880 --> 00:31:15,680
Speaker 1: was the random work of a serial murder. Serial murders exist,

575
00:31:15,920 --> 00:31:18,720
Speaker 1: this does happen from time to time, but is it

576
00:31:18,800 --> 00:31:21,640
Speaker 1: the most likely scenario? And then that's not even getting

577
00:31:21,640 --> 00:31:24,760
Speaker 1: into wilder possibilities like well, perhaps it was a an

578
00:31:24,760 --> 00:31:28,240
Speaker 1: assassin a spy whom mistook them for another person. Well

579
00:31:28,360 --> 00:31:31,160
Speaker 1: that's possible too, but again, more far more steps that

580
00:31:31,240 --> 00:31:35,600
Speaker 1: are necessary, the the the shorter trip is the more likely, right,

581
00:31:35,720 --> 00:31:38,800
Speaker 1: And in terms of not making more assumptions than you need,

582
00:31:38,920 --> 00:31:41,280
Speaker 1: ball rights that. This is of course good advice. If

583
00:31:41,280 --> 00:31:43,560
Speaker 1: you're trying to come up with a good explanation for something,

584
00:31:43,840 --> 00:31:46,520
Speaker 1: you add nothing by writing in a bunch of extra

585
00:31:46,560 --> 00:31:51,000
Speaker 1: complications that don't help the explanation explain anything more than

586
00:31:51,040 --> 00:31:53,880
Speaker 1: it did when it was simpler they should. Explanations should

587
00:31:53,880 --> 00:31:56,360
Speaker 1: be as simple as they can be without losing power

588
00:31:56,440 --> 00:32:00,560
Speaker 1: to explain and predict. Quote. That's why most scientific theories

589
00:32:00,600 --> 00:32:05,400
Speaker 1: are intentional simplifications. They ignore some effects, not because they

590
00:32:05,400 --> 00:32:08,640
Speaker 1: don't happen, but because they're thought to have a negligible

591
00:32:08,640 --> 00:32:12,400
Speaker 1: effect on the outcome. Applied this way, simplicity is a

592
00:32:12,440 --> 00:32:16,960
Speaker 1: practical virtue, allowing a clearer view of what's most important

593
00:32:17,000 --> 00:32:20,600
Speaker 1: in a phenomenon. So again he's saying there that Okam's razor,

594
00:32:20,760 --> 00:32:24,280
Speaker 1: it's it's not necessarily that Ockham's razor tells you what's true,

595
00:32:24,760 --> 00:32:29,480
Speaker 1: but Okam's razor makes theories useful. Because then he goes

596
00:32:29,520 --> 00:32:32,400
Speaker 1: on to argue that Okham's razor is quote fetishized and

597
00:32:32,520 --> 00:32:37,040
Speaker 1: misapplied as a guiding beacon for scientific inquiry. So he thinks, what,

598
00:32:37,200 --> 00:32:39,440
Speaker 1: you know, what we're just saying simplicity is a virtue

599
00:32:39,480 --> 00:32:43,600
Speaker 1: of theories and explanations because they make theories clearer, easier

600
00:32:43,640 --> 00:32:47,040
Speaker 1: to use. But it's dangerous to jump from that to

601
00:32:47,080 --> 00:32:51,840
Speaker 1: the assumption that simplicity is actually a measure of truth. Quote. Here,

602
00:32:51,920 --> 00:32:54,680
Speaker 1: the the implication is that the simplest theory isn't just

603
00:32:54,800 --> 00:32:58,840
Speaker 1: more convenient, but gets closer to how nature really works.

604
00:32:59,240 --> 00:33:02,800
Speaker 1: In other words, it's more probably the correct. One Ball

605
00:33:02,840 --> 00:33:06,040
Speaker 1: says this is wrong is simplicity does not actually tell

606
00:33:06,080 --> 00:33:09,200
Speaker 1: you anything about which theories are right and which ones

607
00:33:09,240 --> 00:33:12,719
Speaker 1: are wrong. He argues, there's really no reason to believe

608
00:33:12,800 --> 00:33:16,840
Speaker 1: that simpler theories better describe nature than complicated ones, and

609
00:33:16,840 --> 00:33:19,440
Speaker 1: he gives a few examples. He talks about Francis Crick

610
00:33:19,640 --> 00:33:23,200
Speaker 1: warning against trying to apply Okham's razor as a critical

611
00:33:23,240 --> 00:33:27,240
Speaker 1: tool for theories in biology because biology gets really messy,

612
00:33:27,280 --> 00:33:29,920
Speaker 1: and he cites examples where it kind of led us astray.

613
00:33:30,000 --> 00:33:33,720
Speaker 1: Like he he cites Alfred kempis eighteen seventy nine proof

614
00:33:33,800 --> 00:33:37,000
Speaker 1: of the four color theorem and mathematics, which was kind

615
00:33:37,000 --> 00:33:39,520
Speaker 1: of favored for a while because the proof was considered

616
00:33:39,640 --> 00:33:42,440
Speaker 1: very simple and very elegant, but it turned out to

617
00:33:42,440 --> 00:33:45,800
Speaker 1: be wrong, you know, very roughly. Here it makes me

618
00:33:45,880 --> 00:33:47,920
Speaker 1: think of something we talked about before in the show

619
00:33:47,920 --> 00:33:52,719
Speaker 1: about how how evolution is often kind of a miser

620
00:33:52,800 --> 00:33:56,880
Speaker 1: it's often cheap, uh, And so part of that, you

621
00:33:56,880 --> 00:34:00,000
Speaker 1: could you could apply the simplicity model to that and say, Okay,

622
00:34:00,160 --> 00:34:02,960
Speaker 1: it's that means it tends to take the shortest route,

623
00:34:03,000 --> 00:34:06,840
Speaker 1: it tends to to perhaps engage in simplicity, but at

624
00:34:06,880 --> 00:34:10,480
Speaker 1: the same time, uh, it's kind of lazy, and lazy

625
00:34:10,520 --> 00:34:13,759
Speaker 1: can create these sort of messes where and yea, yeah,

626
00:34:13,800 --> 00:34:17,360
Speaker 1: we're saying, like some biological structure has evolved, you know,

627
00:34:17,440 --> 00:34:20,320
Speaker 1: for one thing, but it ends up getting partially abandoned

628
00:34:20,280 --> 00:34:22,520
Speaker 1: and then reused for something else. And it can get

629
00:34:22,560 --> 00:34:24,920
Speaker 1: it can get messy, it can get complicated. A million

630
00:34:25,040 --> 00:34:29,440
Speaker 1: years of shortcuts can turn into a quite circuitous route. Yeah,

631
00:34:29,520 --> 00:34:32,560
Speaker 1: and so Ball rights that in his view, he has

632
00:34:32,600 --> 00:34:35,760
Speaker 1: not found a single case in the history of science

633
00:34:35,760 --> 00:34:39,840
Speaker 1: where Akham's razor was actually used to settle a debate

634
00:34:39,920 --> 00:34:43,480
Speaker 1: between rival theories. So I just want to make sure

635
00:34:43,520 --> 00:34:45,919
Speaker 1: that his distinction is coming through. He is saying. It's

636
00:34:46,080 --> 00:34:49,879
Speaker 1: useful for trying to make theories easier to talk about,

637
00:34:49,960 --> 00:34:53,480
Speaker 1: easier to understand, easier to apply, But when it comes

638
00:34:53,640 --> 00:34:57,160
Speaker 1: between competing theories trying to say which one is more true,

639
00:34:57,280 --> 00:35:00,560
Speaker 1: which one makes better predictions, he is not found a

640
00:35:00,640 --> 00:35:05,040
Speaker 1: single case where Okam's razor was the decisive factor. And

641
00:35:05,080 --> 00:35:06,719
Speaker 1: what's worse, he says a lot of people have tried

642
00:35:06,760 --> 00:35:11,040
Speaker 1: to retroactively apply Ockham's razor to historical scientific debates where

643
00:35:11,080 --> 00:35:14,560
Speaker 1: it was not in fact too decisive in reality. Uh,

644
00:35:14,600 --> 00:35:17,240
Speaker 1: And he cites as an example a debate we've already discussed,

645
00:35:17,239 --> 00:35:20,839
Speaker 1: the geocentric versus the heliocentric solar system and I thought

646
00:35:20,880 --> 00:35:22,960
Speaker 1: his take on this was really interesting because I I

647
00:35:23,000 --> 00:35:26,120
Speaker 1: had been taken in. I think I had previously thought, well,

648
00:35:26,160 --> 00:35:30,400
Speaker 1: maybe a really good case of Ockham's razor is heliocentrism

649
00:35:30,440 --> 00:35:34,400
Speaker 1: winning over geocentrism, because with geocentrism you just had to

650
00:35:34,400 --> 00:35:37,040
Speaker 1: make all these weird assumptions about the movements of planet.

651
00:35:37,080 --> 00:35:39,799
Speaker 1: You had to do extra work to make it fit right,

652
00:35:40,080 --> 00:35:42,719
Speaker 1: That's what I thought. But he actually digs into the

653
00:35:42,760 --> 00:35:45,880
Speaker 1: debate of the time. Ball points out that in reality,

654
00:35:45,920 --> 00:35:47,319
Speaker 1: so you know, we talked about one of the big

655
00:35:47,360 --> 00:35:50,640
Speaker 1: things being all these epicycles that in the Ptolemaic model,

656
00:35:50,680 --> 00:35:54,040
Speaker 1: with the the geocentric view, the planets go around the Earth,

657
00:35:54,040 --> 00:35:55,680
Speaker 1: but they don't just go around. They make all these

658
00:35:55,680 --> 00:35:58,760
Speaker 1: weird loops and stuff called epicycles. You had to build

659
00:35:58,760 --> 00:36:01,640
Speaker 1: that in in order to explain what astronomers saw in

660
00:36:01,640 --> 00:36:04,360
Speaker 1: the night sky, the planets appearing to regress. They'd go

661
00:36:04,560 --> 00:36:07,919
Speaker 1: back and forth and stuff. Um. So, so he says,

662
00:36:08,000 --> 00:36:10,880
Speaker 1: we've got all these epicycles. But Ball points out that

663
00:36:10,920 --> 00:36:13,959
Speaker 1: in reality, the Copernican model that was being argued about

664
00:36:13,960 --> 00:36:19,239
Speaker 1: in Galileo's day, that heliocentric model was also full of epicycles.

665
00:36:19,320 --> 00:36:22,480
Speaker 1: And this was because Copernicus was not aware of what

666
00:36:22,560 --> 00:36:26,440
Speaker 1: Johannes Kepler would later discover about the orbits of planetary

667
00:36:26,440 --> 00:36:30,880
Speaker 1: bodies being elliptical rather than circular. So because he lacked

668
00:36:30,920 --> 00:36:34,000
Speaker 1: that crucial assumption that that important part of the theory,

669
00:36:34,239 --> 00:36:37,600
Speaker 1: Copernicus also had to build weird little loops into his

670
00:36:37,680 --> 00:36:41,600
Speaker 1: heliocentric model of the Solar system. He got the heliocentrism right,

671
00:36:41,880 --> 00:36:44,640
Speaker 1: but he thought the planets were moving in perfect circles

672
00:36:44,760 --> 00:36:48,920
Speaker 1: that didn't match observations either, So like Ptolemy, he cheated.

673
00:36:48,960 --> 00:36:51,080
Speaker 1: He put all these loops in there to make the

674
00:36:51,120 --> 00:36:55,480
Speaker 1: model work out right, and it wasn't until heliocentrism was

675
00:36:55,560 --> 00:36:58,839
Speaker 1: combined with Kepler and elliptical orbits that the epicycles were

676
00:36:58,840 --> 00:37:02,200
Speaker 1: finally banished. And based on this, Ball argues that there

677
00:37:02,280 --> 00:37:04,319
Speaker 1: was really no way at the time to suggest that

678
00:37:04,360 --> 00:37:08,040
Speaker 1: the Copernican system was simpler. In fact, he points out

679
00:37:08,040 --> 00:37:12,520
Speaker 1: that Copernicus invokes a number of weird, non scientific assumptions

680
00:37:12,520 --> 00:37:15,879
Speaker 1: in support of his model. For example, quote uh in

681
00:37:15,920 --> 00:37:20,520
Speaker 1: his main work on the heliocentric theory, De Revolutionibus, I'm

682
00:37:20,520 --> 00:37:25,360
Speaker 1: gonna have trouble with this one. De Revolutionibus orb um celestium.

683
00:37:25,880 --> 00:37:28,080
Speaker 1: Uh He argued that it was proper for the sun

684
00:37:28,200 --> 00:37:31,040
Speaker 1: to sit at the center quote, as if resting on

685
00:37:31,080 --> 00:37:35,160
Speaker 1: a kingly throne, governing the stars like a wise ruler.

686
00:37:35,880 --> 00:37:39,080
Speaker 1: That doesn't sound like a very scientific criterion. No, I mean,

687
00:37:39,080 --> 00:37:41,480
Speaker 1: maybe he's kind of breaking it down for people, you know.

688
00:37:42,200 --> 00:37:43,960
Speaker 1: I mean, of course he did turn out to be right,

689
00:37:44,239 --> 00:37:48,840
Speaker 1: But like that, that seems like an unjustified assumption based

690
00:37:48,880 --> 00:37:52,080
Speaker 1: on what he knew at the time. Uh Ball also

691
00:37:52,160 --> 00:37:54,839
Speaker 1: points out that by the time Kepler comes around, we're

692
00:37:54,840 --> 00:37:57,880
Speaker 1: no longer in a situation of competing theories trying to

693
00:37:57,960 --> 00:38:04,440
Speaker 1: explain the same observations, because Kepler had access to better observations. Quote.

694
00:38:04,680 --> 00:38:06,960
Speaker 1: The point here is that as a tool for distinguishing

695
00:38:06,960 --> 00:38:10,880
Speaker 1: between rival theories, Occam's razor is only relevant if the

696
00:38:10,880 --> 00:38:15,080
Speaker 1: two theories predict identical results, but one is simpler than

697
00:38:15,120 --> 00:38:18,200
Speaker 1: the other, which is to say, it makes fewer assumptions.

698
00:38:18,600 --> 00:38:22,360
Speaker 1: This is a situation rarely, if ever, encountered in science.

699
00:38:22,800 --> 00:38:26,719
Speaker 1: Much more often theories are distinguished not by making fewer assumptions,

700
00:38:26,800 --> 00:38:31,000
Speaker 1: but different ones. It's then not obvious how to weigh

701
00:38:31,040 --> 00:38:34,200
Speaker 1: them up. I think this is a fantastic point right.

702
00:38:34,239 --> 00:38:36,439
Speaker 1: I think to come back to the aquatic ape theory

703
00:38:36,440 --> 00:38:38,680
Speaker 1: like that, that is one of these rare situations. I

704
00:38:38,760 --> 00:38:40,799
Speaker 1: think that it seems to match up, right, it's making

705
00:38:40,800 --> 00:38:43,560
Speaker 1: additional assumptions, and it's like, oh, yeah, we would have

706
00:38:43,600 --> 00:38:47,000
Speaker 1: to keep those traits later anyway, we need explanations for that.

707
00:38:47,520 --> 00:38:50,520
Speaker 1: It just seems like it's making more assumptions. But that's

708
00:38:50,560 --> 00:38:53,279
Speaker 1: almost never how it goes. Usually the assumption is just

709
00:38:53,400 --> 00:38:56,160
Speaker 1: different assumptions, and then how do you know which assumption

710
00:38:56,280 --> 00:38:58,919
Speaker 1: is simpler than the other one? Right, And the the

711
00:38:59,040 --> 00:39:05,080
Speaker 1: whole aquatic eight section of the of presumed evolutionary advancement

712
00:39:05,160 --> 00:39:08,160
Speaker 1: is kind of its own epicycle, Yeah, exactly removed because

713
00:39:08,200 --> 00:39:10,480
Speaker 1: there's an epicycle in this theory but not in this

714
00:39:10,520 --> 00:39:13,680
Speaker 1: one exactly. Yes. I mean, if you're trying to look

715
00:39:13,719 --> 00:39:17,440
Speaker 1: at like not additional assumptions in the theory, but just

716
00:39:17,719 --> 00:39:21,600
Speaker 1: different assumptions in the theory. Even cases where to us

717
00:39:21,640 --> 00:39:23,759
Speaker 1: it might seem obvious one way or another, which one

718
00:39:23,800 --> 00:39:27,279
Speaker 1: seems simpler, it's not always obvious to people at the time. Uh.

719
00:39:27,320 --> 00:39:31,239
Speaker 1: He He brings up the question of Darwinian evolution is

720
00:39:31,320 --> 00:39:36,080
Speaker 1: descent from a common ancestor more or less complicated than

721
00:39:36,120 --> 00:39:39,480
Speaker 1: the idea of a divine created order common descent. I

722
00:39:39,760 --> 00:39:42,400
Speaker 1: think that would seem like a less complicated theory to

723
00:39:42,440 --> 00:39:45,520
Speaker 1: many of us today, But would it have seemed simpler

724
00:39:45,800 --> 00:39:48,080
Speaker 1: to the world view of people who were debating common

725
00:39:48,120 --> 00:39:50,960
Speaker 1: descent in like the mid late nineteenth century. Who you know,

726
00:39:50,960 --> 00:39:53,680
Speaker 1: you've already got a theistic worldview that's basically a built

727
00:39:53,680 --> 00:39:56,560
Speaker 1: in assumption, right right, Yeah, yeah, A lot of this

728
00:39:56,640 --> 00:39:59,640
Speaker 1: does come down again coming to what we spoke about earlier.

729
00:39:59,680 --> 00:40:03,040
Speaker 1: Regard the basic religious argument. Like if you're coming from

730
00:40:02,600 --> 00:40:06,759
Speaker 1: a really religious background where you've had this um this,

731
00:40:07,320 --> 00:40:09,520
Speaker 1: you know, the the idea the reality of a God

732
00:40:09,600 --> 00:40:13,080
Speaker 1: hammered into you, and then you're presented with with with

733
00:40:13,120 --> 00:40:15,560
Speaker 1: the atheist argument, you know, you may say, well know

734
00:40:15,680 --> 00:40:19,479
Speaker 1: that that is that requires farm There had so many

735
00:40:19,719 --> 00:40:23,959
Speaker 1: epicycles in your your your your atheism, where my my

736
00:40:24,160 --> 00:40:27,120
Speaker 1: faith is just clear and straightforward as a whistle. I mean,

737
00:40:27,160 --> 00:40:29,680
Speaker 1: people did actually argue that way. They'd say, look at

738
00:40:29,680 --> 00:40:31,960
Speaker 1: all this weird stuff you have to assume about the

739
00:40:32,040 --> 00:40:34,040
Speaker 1: history of life, and all I believe is there's a

740
00:40:34,080 --> 00:40:37,080
Speaker 1: divine created order. I mean, that's it's like a bumper

741
00:40:37,080 --> 00:40:40,520
Speaker 1: sticker thing like Uh, what God, God wrote it. I

742
00:40:40,560 --> 00:40:44,439
Speaker 1: believe it in the story three Steps that theory, Yeah,

743
00:40:44,520 --> 00:40:47,720
Speaker 1: it is. Simplicity is often in the eye of the beholder,

744
00:40:47,760 --> 00:40:50,200
Speaker 1: like you don't have h I mean, there are some

745
00:40:50,239 --> 00:40:52,480
Speaker 1: people who would argue there are cases where you can

746
00:40:52,480 --> 00:40:57,440
Speaker 1: try to mathematically quantify uh, complications or assumptions or simplicity,

747
00:40:57,560 --> 00:40:59,680
Speaker 1: But in general that's really hard to do. You don't

748
00:40:59,719 --> 00:41:03,320
Speaker 1: have an objective measure that you can apply from the outside.

749
00:41:03,360 --> 00:41:05,279
Speaker 1: A lot of times it's just going to be kind

750
00:41:05,280 --> 00:41:09,360
Speaker 1: of fuzzy qualitative judgments. What what seems like less of

751
00:41:09,400 --> 00:41:12,520
Speaker 1: an assumption to you. You lack an objective measure, people

752
00:41:12,560 --> 00:41:15,640
Speaker 1: go with their intuitions. Uh. And this does not seem

753
00:41:15,680 --> 00:41:19,240
Speaker 1: like a good recipe for sorting between theories. So coming

754
00:41:19,239 --> 00:41:23,000
Speaker 1: back again to two balse formulation of of Acam's Razer,

755
00:41:23,040 --> 00:41:25,719
Speaker 1: It's basically like, if you have two theories that are

756
00:41:25,760 --> 00:41:29,319
Speaker 1: competing to explain the same things, they make all the

757
00:41:29,400 --> 00:41:32,920
Speaker 1: same predictions and explain it equally well. Yeah, they explain

758
00:41:33,080 --> 00:41:36,640
Speaker 1: they make the same predictions, explain things equally well, but

759
00:41:37,000 --> 00:41:39,440
Speaker 1: one of them has more assumptions. You go with one

760
00:41:39,440 --> 00:41:42,799
Speaker 1: with fewer assumptions. But Ball argues that you almost never

761
00:41:43,000 --> 00:41:46,400
Speaker 1: in reality, get cases where the predictions of two theories

762
00:41:46,719 --> 00:41:51,000
Speaker 1: are exactly the same. Instead quote, scientific models that differ

763
00:41:51,040 --> 00:41:55,319
Speaker 1: in their assumptions typically make slightly different predictions too. It

764
00:41:55,440 --> 00:41:59,480
Speaker 1: is these predictions, not the criteria of simplicity, that are

765
00:41:59,560 --> 00:42:03,440
Speaker 1: of the greatest use for evaluating rival theories. Again, I

766
00:42:03,440 --> 00:42:06,440
Speaker 1: think this is a good point. I mean, theories almost

767
00:42:06,480 --> 00:42:09,160
Speaker 1: never predict the exact same thing, so why not just

768
00:42:09,239 --> 00:42:12,840
Speaker 1: judge them on how good their predictions are? Uh. Finally,

769
00:42:12,880 --> 00:42:15,360
Speaker 1: he writes that he can only think of one real

770
00:42:15,440 --> 00:42:18,960
Speaker 1: instance in UH, in science where there are rival theories

771
00:42:19,440 --> 00:42:23,600
Speaker 1: that make exactly the same predictions on the basis of quote,

772
00:42:23,640 --> 00:42:28,400
Speaker 1: easily numerable and comparable assumptions. And this one example he

773
00:42:28,440 --> 00:42:31,719
Speaker 1: can think of is the different interpretations of quantum mechanics,

774
00:42:32,120 --> 00:42:34,480
Speaker 1: which I think is a fantastic example, and that did

775
00:42:34,520 --> 00:42:36,520
Speaker 1: not come to my mind. But I think he's exactly

776
00:42:36,600 --> 00:42:40,280
Speaker 1: right about this. So we've discussed interpretations of quantum mechanics

777
00:42:40,280 --> 00:42:42,440
Speaker 1: on the show before. We're not going to go deep

778
00:42:42,480 --> 00:42:46,200
Speaker 1: on that, but just for a very short refresher. Basically,

779
00:42:46,280 --> 00:42:50,080
Speaker 1: we know that the mathematical fundamentals of quantum theory are correct.

780
00:42:50,239 --> 00:42:53,879
Speaker 1: They make extremely good predictions, like, we know the theories right,

781
00:42:54,320 --> 00:42:58,280
Speaker 1: but there's a problem. They predict a world of probabilities,

782
00:42:58,520 --> 00:43:01,520
Speaker 1: not of certainties. So if you have a theory that

783
00:43:01,640 --> 00:43:04,880
Speaker 1: predicts an electron will be fifty percent in one state

784
00:43:04,920 --> 00:43:08,040
Speaker 1: and fifty percent in an opposite state, but we only

785
00:43:08,120 --> 00:43:11,880
Speaker 1: ever observe physical reality embodying one state at a time,

786
00:43:12,200 --> 00:43:14,600
Speaker 1: how do you resolve that it just does not match

787
00:43:14,640 --> 00:43:18,239
Speaker 1: our experience of reality. So that's where the interpretations of

788
00:43:18,280 --> 00:43:21,680
Speaker 1: quantum mechanics come in. That they're trying to reconcile this difference,

789
00:43:22,040 --> 00:43:27,520
Speaker 1: explaining why the indeterministic, probabilistic quantum world somehow resolves into

790
00:43:27,520 --> 00:43:31,840
Speaker 1: the solid deterministic world that we experience every day. And

791
00:43:31,880 --> 00:43:34,280
Speaker 1: there are tons of interpretations. You've got like the classic

792
00:43:34,280 --> 00:43:38,399
Speaker 1: Copenhagen interpretation, which predicts that objects exist in a kind

793
00:43:38,400 --> 00:43:41,839
Speaker 1: of a state of superposition until something interacts with them

794
00:43:41,880 --> 00:43:45,200
Speaker 1: and collapses. The way of function makes them assume one

795
00:43:45,239 --> 00:43:48,600
Speaker 1: state or the other. You've got the now popular mini

796
00:43:48,719 --> 00:43:51,920
Speaker 1: worlds interpretation, originating with the physicist you ever at the

797
00:43:51,960 --> 00:43:55,200
Speaker 1: third in the late nineteen fifties. This suggests that reality

798
00:43:55,239 --> 00:43:59,920
Speaker 1: is constantly splitting into infinite alternate timelines based on the

799
00:44:00,040 --> 00:44:03,799
Speaker 1: different possible outcomes of unresolved quantum states, and and we

800
00:44:03,880 --> 00:44:07,279
Speaker 1: only observe one outcome because we are also splitting, and

801
00:44:07,320 --> 00:44:09,759
Speaker 1: the current version of us is only one of many

802
00:44:09,920 --> 00:44:13,040
Speaker 1: uses that experiences one world at a time. And then

803
00:44:13,080 --> 00:44:15,480
Speaker 1: you've got a bunch of other theories to basically, these

804
00:44:15,520 --> 00:44:20,400
Speaker 1: interpretations make exactly the same physical predictions. No matter which

805
00:44:20,400 --> 00:44:23,040
Speaker 1: one of them is correct, the outcomes of our experiments

806
00:44:23,080 --> 00:44:26,000
Speaker 1: will be exactly the same, so there's no way to

807
00:44:26,040 --> 00:44:29,000
Speaker 1: test which one is right. Though, And in a funny turn,

808
00:44:29,239 --> 00:44:31,960
Speaker 1: Ball points out that Okam's razor has been invoked both

809
00:44:32,160 --> 00:44:36,279
Speaker 1: for and against the many worlds interpretation, again coming back

810
00:44:36,320 --> 00:44:37,840
Speaker 1: to the fact that a lot of times this just

811
00:44:37,960 --> 00:44:41,200
Speaker 1: comes down to people's intuitive judgments, Like he quotes the

812
00:44:41,280 --> 00:44:44,520
Speaker 1: quantum theorist role in Omnus quote, as far as economy

813
00:44:44,520 --> 00:44:47,799
Speaker 1: of thought is concerned, there never was anything in the

814
00:44:47,960 --> 00:44:52,040
Speaker 1: history of thought so bluntly contrary to Ockham's rule than

815
00:44:52,080 --> 00:44:55,680
Speaker 1: Everett's many worlds. On the other hand, you've got a

816
00:44:55,719 --> 00:44:59,239
Speaker 1: modern physicist like Sean Carroll of of Caltech who advocates

817
00:44:59,239 --> 00:45:03,239
Speaker 1: the many worlds in repretation, specifically because he argues it's

818
00:45:03,280 --> 00:45:06,800
Speaker 1: the simplest interpretation of quantum theory. He says. It doesn't

819
00:45:06,840 --> 00:45:09,839
Speaker 1: make any additional assumptions. It's the simplest way you can

820
00:45:09,880 --> 00:45:13,480
Speaker 1: map the theory onto reality. The weird thing about about

821
00:45:13,520 --> 00:45:15,760
Speaker 1: this too is that I feel like, at this point,

822
00:45:16,080 --> 00:45:18,920
Speaker 1: if you consume enough science fiction, and not even just

823
00:45:19,000 --> 00:45:22,040
Speaker 1: science fiction but general just popular culture, the many worlds

824
00:45:22,080 --> 00:45:27,200
Speaker 1: interpretation has been used, at least casually so often, then

825
00:45:27,239 --> 00:45:30,880
Speaker 1: in a way it feels slightly more plausible, just because

826
00:45:31,200 --> 00:45:33,840
Speaker 1: just due to familiarity, which I realized is not a

827
00:45:33,880 --> 00:45:37,040
Speaker 1: scientific argue, Like you could not you could not reasonably say, well,

828
00:45:37,480 --> 00:45:40,560
Speaker 1: I leaned towards many worlds interpretation because that's how The

829
00:45:40,680 --> 00:45:43,399
Speaker 1: X Men works, my favorite TV show uses it. It's

830
00:45:43,400 --> 00:45:46,920
Speaker 1: got but on some like level, it's still kind of

831
00:45:47,120 --> 00:45:49,440
Speaker 1: gets into you, it still affects you. I agree. I

832
00:45:49,440 --> 00:45:51,399
Speaker 1: mean again, I think this is this is pointing out

833
00:45:51,400 --> 00:45:54,280
Speaker 1: some of the weaknesses in how Walcom's razor is often applied.

834
00:45:54,360 --> 00:45:57,680
Speaker 1: It's like people think they're applying some kind of objective

835
00:45:57,719 --> 00:46:00,160
Speaker 1: criterion when really they're just kind of going with their

836
00:46:00,160 --> 00:46:04,440
Speaker 1: gut about like what what feels more plausible? Uh, and

837
00:46:04,440 --> 00:46:06,920
Speaker 1: and that's something Ball kind of hammers home at the

838
00:46:07,000 --> 00:46:09,200
Speaker 1: end when he writes, quote, but this is all just

839
00:46:09,320 --> 00:46:13,240
Speaker 1: special pleading. Acam's razor was never meant for pairing nature

840
00:46:13,280 --> 00:46:17,760
Speaker 1: down to some beautiful, parsimonious core of truth. Because science

841
00:46:17,840 --> 00:46:21,320
Speaker 1: is so difficult and messy. The allure of a philosophical

842
00:46:21,360 --> 00:46:24,000
Speaker 1: tool for clearing a path or pruning the thickets is

843
00:46:24,040 --> 00:46:28,080
Speaker 1: obvious in the readiness to find spurious applications of Akham's

844
00:46:28,160 --> 00:46:31,200
Speaker 1: razors in the history of science, or to enlist, dismiss,

845
00:46:31,280 --> 00:46:34,600
Speaker 1: or reshape the razor at will to shore up their preferences.

846
00:46:35,040 --> 00:46:38,800
Speaker 1: Scientists reveal their seduction by this vision, but they should

847
00:46:38,800 --> 00:46:42,200
Speaker 1: resist it. The value of keeping assumptions to a minimum

848
00:46:42,280 --> 00:46:47,480
Speaker 1: is cognitive, not ontological. It helps you think a theory

849
00:46:47,600 --> 00:46:50,239
Speaker 1: is not better if it is simpler, but it might

850
00:46:50,280 --> 00:46:54,279
Speaker 1: well be more useful, and that counts for much more. Yeah,

851
00:46:54,360 --> 00:46:57,440
Speaker 1: that's well put. It helps us think, rather than help

852
00:46:57,520 --> 00:47:01,720
Speaker 1: us explain the world. Right, there's no way to show that. Well. Actually,

853
00:47:01,960 --> 00:47:04,160
Speaker 1: so we're about to get into somebody who says that

854
00:47:04,160 --> 00:47:06,600
Speaker 1: there may be cases where you can show simpler theories

855
00:47:06,640 --> 00:47:10,440
Speaker 1: are objectively more true. But but Ball argues that at

856
00:47:10,480 --> 00:47:13,120
Speaker 1: least most of the time in science and real competing

857
00:47:13,160 --> 00:47:16,400
Speaker 1: theories in the history of science. It's not that simpler

858
00:47:16,440 --> 00:47:20,279
Speaker 1: theories are more true or explain reality better. They're just

859
00:47:20,400 --> 00:47:23,440
Speaker 1: easier to get your head around and test. All right,

860
00:47:23,520 --> 00:47:25,320
Speaker 1: on that note, we're going to take one more break,

861
00:47:25,520 --> 00:47:28,200
Speaker 1: but we will be right back with further discussion of

862
00:47:28,520 --> 00:47:34,239
Speaker 1: the razor. Thank alright, we're back. All right. There's one

863
00:47:34,239 --> 00:47:37,120
Speaker 1: more article about Akham's razor that I found really interesting,

864
00:47:37,440 --> 00:47:40,720
Speaker 1: very useful, and it is called why is Simpler Better?

865
00:47:41,120 --> 00:47:44,160
Speaker 1: This was published in Eon by Elliott Sober, who is

866
00:47:44,200 --> 00:47:47,520
Speaker 1: a professor of philosophy at the University of Wisconsin Madison,

867
00:47:47,960 --> 00:47:50,440
Speaker 1: and he's published a lot on the philosophy of science,

868
00:47:50,440 --> 00:47:54,120
Speaker 1: specifically as it applies to biology and natural selection, and

869
00:47:54,200 --> 00:47:56,520
Speaker 1: he wrote a book on the subject of Ockham's razor.

870
00:47:57,160 --> 00:47:59,640
Speaker 1: Uh So, he starts off, I think this is kind

871
00:47:59,640 --> 00:48:03,680
Speaker 1: of mentor talking about simplicity and complexity and art. Could

872
00:48:03,680 --> 00:48:07,160
Speaker 1: you possibly have a norm that one is always better

873
00:48:07,320 --> 00:48:10,400
Speaker 1: than the other? I mean that seems kind of strange, right, Like,

874
00:48:10,440 --> 00:48:13,200
Speaker 1: we love simple art and we love complex art, and

875
00:48:13,239 --> 00:48:15,600
Speaker 1: it would be strange to find a person who just

876
00:48:15,800 --> 00:48:18,839
Speaker 1: wants one or the other. Yeah, I mean this makes

877
00:48:18,880 --> 00:48:22,680
Speaker 1: me think of of movie posters. I don't know, you

878
00:48:22,719 --> 00:48:24,799
Speaker 1: probably remember it seems like it was a few years back.

879
00:48:25,280 --> 00:48:29,800
Speaker 1: The big craze for a while was that the designers

880
00:48:29,840 --> 00:48:33,399
Speaker 1: would come up with a super simplistic movie poster for

881
00:48:33,800 --> 00:48:37,120
Speaker 1: classic film or a you know, a fan favorite film.

882
00:48:37,160 --> 00:48:39,920
Speaker 1: And it was really fun for a while. And uh

883
00:48:39,960 --> 00:48:42,279
Speaker 1: and but then it kind of overstates its welcome, you know,

884
00:48:42,360 --> 00:48:44,799
Speaker 1: and and and it just became kind of, at least

885
00:48:44,800 --> 00:48:47,000
Speaker 1: to me anyway, kind of kind of irritating to even

886
00:48:47,160 --> 00:48:48,719
Speaker 1: look at. You're like, no, I don't I don't want

887
00:48:48,760 --> 00:48:52,360
Speaker 1: to see like this film reduced to this ultra simplistic symbol.

888
00:48:52,560 --> 00:48:54,600
Speaker 1: I know exactly what you're talking about. And I think

889
00:48:54,640 --> 00:48:57,000
Speaker 1: there was a counter reaction because then you started to

890
00:48:57,000 --> 00:49:00,440
Speaker 1: see a lot of graphic design for redoing old movies

891
00:49:00,480 --> 00:49:02,520
Speaker 1: with new posters in the kind of return of the

892
00:49:02,560 --> 00:49:05,480
Speaker 1: Jedi stuff where there's a bunch of stuff, there's like

893
00:49:05,480 --> 00:49:08,640
Speaker 1: a bunch of people on the poster and things happening, yeah,

894
00:49:08,760 --> 00:49:11,400
Speaker 1: or that it's just kind of like a geometric explosion

895
00:49:11,480 --> 00:49:14,520
Speaker 1: of things, you know. Uh So, yeah, you saw the

896
00:49:14,520 --> 00:49:17,600
Speaker 1: pendulum swing both ways. But in general, yeah, I feel

897
00:49:17,600 --> 00:49:19,520
Speaker 1: like it's that way in art. I mean, I think

898
00:49:19,560 --> 00:49:22,120
Speaker 1: we can all point to specific examples in our own

899
00:49:22,160 --> 00:49:24,799
Speaker 1: life where here's something we like that is very very

900
00:49:24,840 --> 00:49:27,360
Speaker 1: tight and neat and minimalists. Maybe it's even like a

901
00:49:27,480 --> 00:49:32,560
Speaker 1: musical argument. Yeah, I love like minimalist ambient recordings, but

902
00:49:32,640 --> 00:49:36,000
Speaker 1: I'm also the type of person who enjoys uh cacophonist

903
00:49:36,040 --> 00:49:41,000
Speaker 1: recordings and complex recordings, and likewise with visual arts, likewise

904
00:49:41,040 --> 00:49:44,640
Speaker 1: with you know, film, TV and other mediums you you

905
00:49:44,760 --> 00:49:48,200
Speaker 1: like hugely layered like mixed tracks and stuff. Yeah. Yeah,

906
00:49:48,680 --> 00:49:51,919
Speaker 1: but then I also like, uh, you know, I love

907
00:49:52,160 --> 00:49:53,839
Speaker 1: I don't, I don't. I don't know that it gets

908
00:49:53,920 --> 00:49:56,279
Speaker 1: kind of complicated, right, because even something that is very

909
00:49:56,280 --> 00:49:59,920
Speaker 1: minimalist can be of course very complicated and layered. Uh.

910
00:50:00,520 --> 00:50:04,160
Speaker 1: But but yeah, I think everybody is gonna everybody's taste

911
00:50:04,200 --> 00:50:06,440
Speaker 1: pendulum is going to swing both ways there. But that's

912
00:50:06,440 --> 00:50:08,640
Speaker 1: the world of art though, right, I mean, so that's

913
00:50:08,680 --> 00:50:12,040
Speaker 1: one thing, that's the world of human creation. Um, and

914
00:50:12,160 --> 00:50:16,560
Speaker 1: sometimes those creations are are made, uh to mimic nature,

915
00:50:16,560 --> 00:50:19,359
Speaker 1: but they are not necessarily nature itself, right, Yes, And

916
00:50:19,520 --> 00:50:21,880
Speaker 1: I think you can apply something similar to science. So

917
00:50:22,239 --> 00:50:24,040
Speaker 1: some of what Sober is going to write in this

918
00:50:24,120 --> 00:50:26,600
Speaker 1: article mirrors what we were just talking about with ball

919
00:50:26,719 --> 00:50:29,400
Speaker 1: like he He starts off by saying, Okay, it's clear

920
00:50:29,520 --> 00:50:33,520
Speaker 1: that simpler theories have some qualities that are good. They're

921
00:50:33,560 --> 00:50:38,120
Speaker 1: easier to understand, they're easier to remember, they're easier to test. Uh,

922
00:50:38,160 --> 00:50:41,200
Speaker 1: And of course in just an aesthetic sense, they can

923
00:50:41,200 --> 00:50:44,080
Speaker 1: be more beautiful. But he says that the real problem

924
00:50:44,120 --> 00:50:46,040
Speaker 1: comes in when you're trying to figure out how good

925
00:50:46,120 --> 00:50:49,200
Speaker 1: is a theory for telling you what's true? You know,

926
00:50:49,280 --> 00:50:52,200
Speaker 1: how well does it predict things that you will encounter

927
00:50:52,239 --> 00:50:55,600
Speaker 1: in the world. Some pasta scientific thinkers have tried to

928
00:50:55,600 --> 00:50:59,520
Speaker 1: come up with reasons why. Yeah, it's like, simplicity is

929
00:50:59,560 --> 00:51:02,480
Speaker 1: actually better, it actually predicts predicts the world better. And

930
00:51:02,480 --> 00:51:06,120
Speaker 1: a lot of these justifications were theological in nature. Uh.

931
00:51:06,320 --> 00:51:09,319
Speaker 1: Like for example, in Newton, in talking about why he

932
00:51:09,360 --> 00:51:13,680
Speaker 1: prefers simpler theories wrote quote to choose those constructions which,

933
00:51:13,719 --> 00:51:17,360
Speaker 1: without straining, reduced things to the greatest simplicity. Uh. The

934
00:51:17,400 --> 00:51:20,200
Speaker 1: reason of this is that truth is ever to be

935
00:51:20,239 --> 00:51:23,759
Speaker 1: found in simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion

936
00:51:23,800 --> 00:51:26,480
Speaker 1: of things. It is the perfection of God's works that

937
00:51:26,560 --> 00:51:29,400
Speaker 1: they are all done with the greatest simplicity. He is

938
00:51:29,440 --> 00:51:32,520
Speaker 1: the God of order and not of confusion. And therefore,

939
00:51:32,800 --> 00:51:35,320
Speaker 1: as they that would understand the frame of the world

940
00:51:35,440 --> 00:51:38,960
Speaker 1: must endeavor to reduce their knowledge to all possible simplicity.

941
00:51:39,320 --> 00:51:42,280
Speaker 1: So it must be in seeking to understand these visions.

942
00:51:42,640 --> 00:51:44,440
Speaker 1: So again, I mean, I would say that's fine to

943
00:51:44,480 --> 00:51:47,520
Speaker 1: believe that. That's not a scientific reason for believing things

944
00:51:47,560 --> 00:51:50,120
Speaker 1: that simpler things are more likely to be true. Right,

945
00:51:50,120 --> 00:51:51,920
Speaker 1: he had to fall back on the idea that we

946
00:51:52,000 --> 00:51:55,680
Speaker 1: have a lawful, good God as opposed to a chaotic

947
00:51:55,719 --> 00:51:57,840
Speaker 1: good God. Right, I mean, it would only be a

948
00:51:57,880 --> 00:52:01,320
Speaker 1: bad God that would allow more complex explanations to be correct.

949
00:52:01,760 --> 00:52:05,600
Speaker 1: And Sober actually says there are some cases today, uh,

950
00:52:05,680 --> 00:52:08,799
Speaker 1: that can help us know when a model is objectively

951
00:52:08,920 --> 00:52:12,240
Speaker 1: more accurate, like modern statistical methods. There are some ways

952
00:52:12,320 --> 00:52:16,800
Speaker 1: that you can reduce theories to mathematical advantage, at least roughly,

953
00:52:17,360 --> 00:52:20,399
Speaker 1: and that in these cases there there are times where

954
00:52:20,400 --> 00:52:23,960
Speaker 1: you can show simpler is actually better. Uh. He argues,

955
00:52:24,000 --> 00:52:27,080
Speaker 1: there are three paradigms in which Occam's razor holds true,

956
00:52:27,600 --> 00:52:30,920
Speaker 1: and so the first one is that sometimes simpler theories

957
00:52:31,200 --> 00:52:36,080
Speaker 1: actually have higher probabilities. He invokes the medical adage here,

958
00:52:36,280 --> 00:52:39,800
Speaker 1: don't chase zebras. This is this comes from the idea

959
00:52:39,840 --> 00:52:43,320
Speaker 1: of you know, when you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras.

960
00:52:43,320 --> 00:52:47,040
Speaker 1: I've also heard that as unicorns. As another analogy, if

961
00:52:47,040 --> 00:52:49,319
Speaker 1: you hear footsteps coming down the hall, you can have

962
00:52:49,360 --> 00:52:52,000
Speaker 1: a couple of different hypotheses. It's a human walking down

963
00:52:52,040 --> 00:52:54,879
Speaker 1: the hall, or it's a RoboCop walking down the hall.

964
00:52:55,320 --> 00:52:57,719
Speaker 1: Which one is going to be correct more often? Well,

965
00:52:57,719 --> 00:53:01,160
Speaker 1: it's going to be a human. It could conceivably be

966
00:53:01,280 --> 00:53:05,440
Speaker 1: somebody in a RoboCup cost him, but the chances of

967
00:53:05,440 --> 00:53:07,640
Speaker 1: that are pretty slim. I mean, unless you like, are

968
00:53:07,680 --> 00:53:10,560
Speaker 1: in a RoboCop factory or something, It's going to be

969
00:53:10,600 --> 00:53:12,719
Speaker 1: a human way more often. And the same goes in

970
00:53:12,800 --> 00:53:16,319
Speaker 1: diagnosing diseases. If you observe a set of symptoms in

971
00:53:16,400 --> 00:53:19,840
Speaker 1: patient history that are equally likely to predict a common

972
00:53:19,840 --> 00:53:23,279
Speaker 1: disease and a rare disease, pick the common one, You're

973
00:53:23,320 --> 00:53:25,640
Speaker 1: going to be correct much more often than if you

974
00:53:25,680 --> 00:53:28,359
Speaker 1: always pick the rare one. Right. Um. You know this

975
00:53:28,400 --> 00:53:31,440
Speaker 1: also brings me back to the serial killer example. You know,

976
00:53:31,520 --> 00:53:34,560
Speaker 1: like what what is more more likely though, that it's

977
00:53:34,600 --> 00:53:37,280
Speaker 1: someone the individual knew, or it is a random killing

978
00:53:37,280 --> 00:53:39,600
Speaker 1: by a serial murder. You know, unless there is a

979
00:53:39,600 --> 00:53:42,480
Speaker 1: serial murder active in the area, which raises that that

980
00:53:43,200 --> 00:53:44,960
Speaker 1: the chances for that to be true, but by a

981
00:53:44,960 --> 00:53:48,680
Speaker 1: considerable margin. Uh, it's going to remain a zebra. Now

982
00:53:48,760 --> 00:53:52,040
Speaker 1: a unicorn, but a zebra exactly, unless you have independent

983
00:53:52,120 --> 00:53:55,200
Speaker 1: evidence pointing to that as a superior hypothesis. There's no

984
00:53:55,280 --> 00:53:59,000
Speaker 1: reason to go to a rare phenomenon that would explain

985
00:53:59,080 --> 00:54:01,440
Speaker 1: things equally l Yeah, so I know, it seems like

986
00:54:01,480 --> 00:54:04,360
Speaker 1: there are enough podcasts about serial murders. It might seem

987
00:54:04,400 --> 00:54:06,919
Speaker 1: like there are more of them out there than there are. Well,

988
00:54:06,960 --> 00:54:10,759
Speaker 1: there you get into some cognitive biases. Yeah, the availability

989
00:54:10,800 --> 00:54:14,920
Speaker 1: heuristic kicks in. But of course another question is like,

990
00:54:14,960 --> 00:54:17,759
Speaker 1: how often does a thorough review actually put you in

991
00:54:17,760 --> 00:54:21,520
Speaker 1: the situation where two things explain what you see equally well,

992
00:54:21,640 --> 00:54:25,799
Speaker 1: like truly equally well. One's rare and one's common. But

993
00:54:26,200 --> 00:54:28,840
Speaker 1: but so Sober says that you've got this concept he

994
00:54:28,880 --> 00:54:32,799
Speaker 1: calls the razor of silence, and and the basic explanation

995
00:54:32,800 --> 00:54:35,560
Speaker 1: of this is that if you've got evidence that A

996
00:54:35,960 --> 00:54:38,880
Speaker 1: is the cause of something and no evidence that B

997
00:54:39,280 --> 00:54:43,120
Speaker 1: is the cause of something, then A alone is statistically

998
00:54:43,160 --> 00:54:47,000
Speaker 1: a better explanation than A and B together. This goes

999
00:54:47,040 --> 00:54:49,520
Speaker 1: back to the stacking of explanations that we were talking

1000
00:54:49,560 --> 00:54:52,360
Speaker 1: about earlier. Like, if you've got an explanation that already

1001
00:54:52,360 --> 00:54:57,840
Speaker 1: explains everything, there is no justification for adding additional explanations

1002
00:54:57,840 --> 00:54:59,839
Speaker 1: on top of it. But you don't need to add

1003
00:54:59,840 --> 00:55:02,719
Speaker 1: the angels pushing the planets. Well, let's come back to

1004
00:55:02,760 --> 00:55:06,279
Speaker 1: the murder scenario. How do we apply this forensically? Uh? Well,

1005
00:55:06,520 --> 00:55:08,680
Speaker 1: as so we're actually I think says something kind of

1006
00:55:08,680 --> 00:55:11,480
Speaker 1: like this, but like, if you have clear evidence of

1007
00:55:11,520 --> 00:55:14,319
Speaker 1: one cause of death on somebody, you don't need to

1008
00:55:14,360 --> 00:55:17,840
Speaker 1: assume extra causes of death stacking on top of it

1009
00:55:18,280 --> 00:55:21,080
Speaker 1: without direct evidence of them as well. So if you find,

1010
00:55:21,120 --> 00:55:24,000
Speaker 1: like a you know, a body, I don't know, a

1011
00:55:24,000 --> 00:55:26,520
Speaker 1: body at the bottom of a cliff and they're dead,

1012
00:55:26,640 --> 00:55:28,800
Speaker 1: you can assume that it was falling off the cliff

1013
00:55:28,840 --> 00:55:31,080
Speaker 1: that killed them. You don't need to also assume that

1014
00:55:31,120 --> 00:55:34,000
Speaker 1: they were poisoned or something. Unless you know, you do

1015
00:55:34,040 --> 00:55:36,799
Speaker 1: blood talks and then it comes back with poison you

1016
00:55:36,840 --> 00:55:39,320
Speaker 1: can't assume it then. But there's no reason to start

1017
00:55:39,360 --> 00:55:44,560
Speaker 1: stacking on additional assumptions. Now there's another way that sober says,

1018
00:55:44,640 --> 00:55:48,320
Speaker 1: sometimes Occam's razer actually does hold true. It it's sometimes

1019
00:55:48,320 --> 00:55:52,000
Speaker 1: simpler explanations are better, and it's simply that sometimes simpler

1020
00:55:52,040 --> 00:55:56,120
Speaker 1: theories are better supported by observations. Uh. He gives this

1021
00:55:56,200 --> 00:55:58,960
Speaker 1: great example. Suppose all the lights on your street go out.

1022
00:55:59,480 --> 00:56:03,640
Speaker 1: You could have to competing hypotheses. First, one something happened

1023
00:56:03,640 --> 00:56:06,960
Speaker 1: at the power plant, and that influenced what happened to

1024
00:56:07,000 --> 00:56:09,160
Speaker 1: all the lights in the neighborhood, or maybe there's a

1025
00:56:09,200 --> 00:56:13,080
Speaker 1: down power line something like that. The other one, something

1026
00:56:13,120 --> 00:56:17,200
Speaker 1: happened to all of the light bulbs at the same time. Now,

1027
00:56:17,239 --> 00:56:22,120
Speaker 1: these would both explain the observations, right, like either either

1028
00:56:22,239 --> 00:56:25,879
Speaker 1: all of the light bulbs suddenly went out on their own, independently,

1029
00:56:25,920 --> 00:56:28,440
Speaker 1: just coincidentally, all at the same time, or there's something

1030
00:56:28,480 --> 00:56:32,720
Speaker 1: happened with the power supply to the whole neighborhood. Sober argues,

1031
00:56:32,760 --> 00:56:35,759
Speaker 1: based on the work of the philosopher Hans Reichenbach, that

1032
00:56:35,880 --> 00:56:38,680
Speaker 1: in this case you can actually show mathematically that the

1033
00:56:38,719 --> 00:56:42,880
Speaker 1: evidence for the first for the power plant hypothesis is stronger,

1034
00:56:43,320 --> 00:56:46,200
Speaker 1: just based on the fact that it's simpler. Uh. And

1035
00:56:46,560 --> 00:56:49,800
Speaker 1: a similar example in real science look at common descent

1036
00:56:49,920 --> 00:56:53,760
Speaker 1: in biology. So based on the evidence of massive amounts

1037
00:56:53,760 --> 00:56:57,640
Speaker 1: of genetic code shared by all living things. Today, people

1038
00:56:57,800 --> 00:57:00,960
Speaker 1: usually say, okay, that that's evidence of common descent. We

1039
00:57:01,040 --> 00:57:04,720
Speaker 1: all share a common ancestor we all inherit some common

1040
00:57:04,760 --> 00:57:08,160
Speaker 1: genetic code. Now you could also say, well, maybe all

1041
00:57:08,239 --> 00:57:10,799
Speaker 1: living things on Earth have different ancestors and they just

1042
00:57:10,920 --> 00:57:15,120
Speaker 1: happened by coincidence to have overlapping strings of genetic code.

1043
00:57:15,680 --> 00:57:18,760
Speaker 1: That would require a lot of strange coincidences. So the

1044
00:57:18,800 --> 00:57:21,840
Speaker 1: evidence actually favors common descent, just like it favors a

1045
00:57:21,880 --> 00:57:26,720
Speaker 1: power outage over hundreds of simultaneous lightbulb failures. So a

1046
00:57:26,800 --> 00:57:30,640
Speaker 1: serial killer example of this might be, oh, man, what's

1047
00:57:30,680 --> 00:57:32,960
Speaker 1: happening in the dark corners of your brain today? Rob?

1048
00:57:33,040 --> 00:57:34,280
Speaker 1: I don't know. I just keep coming back to it,

1049
00:57:34,320 --> 00:57:37,520
Speaker 1: I guess. But okay, so one parton, So if like people,

1050
00:57:37,840 --> 00:57:40,040
Speaker 1: they're all these dead people and they all have say

1051
00:57:40,440 --> 00:57:44,920
Speaker 1: a death head, moth um, what was a caterpillar? Oh yes, yes,

1052
00:57:45,000 --> 00:57:47,880
Speaker 1: yes yes? Or was it a cocoon? I can't recall

1053
00:57:47,920 --> 00:57:50,280
Speaker 1: off hand and from silence of the lamps. Yeah, they've

1054
00:57:50,280 --> 00:57:52,440
Speaker 1: got like a moth cocoon in their mouth or something.

1055
00:57:52,560 --> 00:57:56,320
Speaker 1: So perhaps they just happened to each individually wind up

1056
00:57:56,320 --> 00:57:58,560
Speaker 1: with one in their mouth, like somebody accidentally eight one

1057
00:57:58,880 --> 00:58:00,520
Speaker 1: one in a salad bar, and the one was like

1058
00:58:00,560 --> 00:58:02,400
Speaker 1: looking up and it fell out of a tree, because

1059
00:58:02,440 --> 00:58:04,400
Speaker 1: one had escaped from a private collection, was living in

1060
00:58:04,400 --> 00:58:08,560
Speaker 1: a tree. You can have sort of independent explanations for

1061
00:58:08,640 --> 00:58:11,120
Speaker 1: why each of these occurred, or the other possibility is

1062
00:58:11,120 --> 00:58:13,280
Speaker 1: somebody's killing them and putting them in their throats. Right,

1063
00:58:13,320 --> 00:58:17,520
Speaker 1: the one common explanation actually explains observations better than assuming

1064
00:58:17,560 --> 00:58:20,360
Speaker 1: a whole bunch of strange coincidences. And then we got

1065
00:58:20,360 --> 00:58:23,160
Speaker 1: the third paradigm Sober gets into, which is that he says,

1066
00:58:23,200 --> 00:58:26,680
Speaker 1: sometimes the simplicity of a model is relevant to estimating

1067
00:58:26,720 --> 00:58:30,200
Speaker 1: its predictive accuracy. So what a good theories do well?

1068
00:58:30,240 --> 00:58:32,880
Speaker 1: They make accurate predictions about things we don't know yet.

1069
00:58:32,960 --> 00:58:37,080
Speaker 1: They either accurately predict future measurements or outcomes or discoveries.

1070
00:58:37,600 --> 00:58:40,840
Speaker 1: Does ocams Raiser have anything to say here? Sober says, yes,

1071
00:58:41,080 --> 00:58:45,400
Speaker 1: sometimes simplicity effects our best guesses about how accurate a

1072
00:58:45,440 --> 00:58:48,280
Speaker 1: new theory will be, and he cites the work of

1073
00:58:48,320 --> 00:58:52,919
Speaker 1: a Japanese statistician named Hiratugu Akayiki who did important work

1074
00:58:52,920 --> 00:58:56,160
Speaker 1: in a field called model selection theory. This means how

1075
00:58:56,240 --> 00:58:58,600
Speaker 1: to judge the strength of a new model or theory

1076
00:58:58,680 --> 00:59:01,400
Speaker 1: before it has had time to be tested in the field,

1077
00:59:02,240 --> 00:59:07,160
Speaker 1: and a model evaluation system called the Akayiki information criterion

1078
00:59:07,480 --> 00:59:09,439
Speaker 1: says that you can predict how good a new model

1079
00:59:09,560 --> 00:59:12,200
Speaker 1: or theory will be by two measures, how well it

1080
00:59:12,240 --> 00:59:15,520
Speaker 1: fits old or existing data. Obviously, better fits are better,

1081
00:59:15,880 --> 00:59:19,400
Speaker 1: and then how simple it is. Simpler models are better. Uh.

1082
00:59:19,440 --> 00:59:23,760
Speaker 1: Simplicity is evaluated by quote the number of adjustable parameters,

1083
00:59:23,800 --> 00:59:27,160
Speaker 1: and having fewer is better. Now. Sober gives an analysis

1084
00:59:27,200 --> 00:59:29,360
Speaker 1: of why this is the case using an example of

1085
00:59:29,720 --> 00:59:32,040
Speaker 1: trying to estimate the height of plants in a corn

1086
00:59:32,120 --> 00:59:35,480
Speaker 1: field based on previous random samplings of the fields. I'm

1087
00:59:35,520 --> 00:59:37,560
Speaker 1: not going to get down into all the details of this,

1088
00:59:37,600 --> 00:59:39,520
Speaker 1: but if you want a deeper understanding of this one,

1089
00:59:39,840 --> 00:59:42,400
Speaker 1: I'd recommend looking up the article that. The short version

1090
00:59:42,480 --> 00:59:45,280
Speaker 1: is that in some situations, depending on a number of

1091
00:59:45,320 --> 00:59:48,320
Speaker 1: assumptions about what types of models and data you're dealing with,

1092
00:59:48,680 --> 00:59:51,400
Speaker 1: simplicity of a model is actually a good predictor of

1093
00:59:51,440 --> 00:59:54,720
Speaker 1: how well future data will conform to that model. And

1094
00:59:54,760 --> 00:59:57,840
Speaker 1: it's just a fact about statistics. The sorcery of average

1095
00:59:57,920 --> 01:00:01,520
Speaker 1: is not a fact about individual cases is on the ground. Now.

1096
01:00:01,600 --> 01:00:04,720
Speaker 1: He concludes by saying that these three paradigms have something

1097
01:00:05,440 --> 01:00:08,680
Speaker 1: in common and quote whether a given problem fits into

1098
01:00:08,720 --> 01:00:13,040
Speaker 1: any of them depends on empirical assumptions about the problem.

1099
01:00:13,040 --> 01:00:16,000
Speaker 1: Those assumptions might be true of some problems but false

1100
01:00:16,040 --> 01:00:21,000
Speaker 1: of others. Although parsimony is demonstrably relevant informing judgments about

1101
01:00:21,040 --> 01:00:23,480
Speaker 1: what the world is like, there is, in the end,

1102
01:00:23,640 --> 01:00:30,360
Speaker 1: no unconditional and presupposition less justification for Ockham's razor. Uh So,

1103
01:00:30,480 --> 01:00:33,040
Speaker 1: so that's tough, right, Like Ockham's razor is not a

1104
01:00:33,040 --> 01:00:35,960
Speaker 1: tool you can apply to every situation to get closer

1105
01:00:35,960 --> 01:00:40,040
Speaker 1: to the truth. It's a tool that is useful sometimes

1106
01:00:40,080 --> 01:00:43,840
Speaker 1: for some types of judgment. And the real difficulty is

1107
01:00:43,880 --> 01:00:47,400
Speaker 1: recognizing when you're in one of those situations in which

1108
01:00:47,400 --> 01:00:50,720
Speaker 1: it's useful or one of those situations where it's actually

1109
01:00:50,720 --> 01:00:53,960
Speaker 1: just a logical red herring. So really it kind of

1110
01:00:53,960 --> 01:00:56,080
Speaker 1: comes back to, uh, you know, we we were talking

1111
01:00:56,080 --> 01:00:57,800
Speaker 1: about Sagan at the beginning of this and how he

1112
01:00:57,840 --> 01:01:00,440
Speaker 1: said this is one of the tools in your Eptics

1113
01:01:00,480 --> 01:01:03,360
Speaker 1: tool chest, and the thing about a tool chest is

1114
01:01:03,400 --> 01:01:05,800
Speaker 1: that you have more than one tool in there. And

1115
01:01:05,960 --> 01:01:08,920
Speaker 1: the screwdriver cannot be used for everything, right, I mean,

1116
01:01:08,920 --> 01:01:10,760
Speaker 1: you can try. It's useful for a lot of things,

1117
01:01:11,200 --> 01:01:13,600
Speaker 1: uh and certainly very useful for screws. But there's gonna

1118
01:01:13,640 --> 01:01:16,600
Speaker 1: be a time when you're gonna have to pull out

1119
01:01:16,640 --> 01:01:19,000
Speaker 1: another tool to deal with the problem. And there are

1120
01:01:19,000 --> 01:01:21,560
Speaker 1: gonna be plenty of cases you will encounter We're trying

1121
01:01:21,560 --> 01:01:24,120
Speaker 1: to use the skeptical tool of Akham's razor is like

1122
01:01:24,160 --> 01:01:26,840
Speaker 1: trying to clean out your electrical socket with the screwdriver.

1123
01:01:27,520 --> 01:01:30,200
Speaker 1: You're just it's gonna steer you astray. And I'm very

1124
01:01:30,200 --> 01:01:32,360
Speaker 1: sorry that in the end here we don't have like

1125
01:01:32,400 --> 01:01:35,040
Speaker 1: a clean rule to just guide you like this is

1126
01:01:35,080 --> 01:01:36,920
Speaker 1: when you can use it, this is when you can't.

1127
01:01:37,200 --> 01:01:39,760
Speaker 1: I think it comes down to, I mean, Sober has

1128
01:01:40,240 --> 01:01:42,520
Speaker 1: some useful things to say. They're about like types of

1129
01:01:42,560 --> 01:01:46,240
Speaker 1: situations where it is helpful, but yeah, they're there. There's

1130
01:01:46,440 --> 01:01:48,480
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, there's not just like an easy rule of

1131
01:01:48,520 --> 01:01:51,360
Speaker 1: thumb for when the when the razor will be helpful. Yeah.

1132
01:01:51,400 --> 01:01:53,560
Speaker 1: I mean, ultimately, it is a tool that was not

1133
01:01:54,000 --> 01:01:56,320
Speaker 1: plucked out of the sky, but it was plucked out

1134
01:01:56,360 --> 01:01:59,840
Speaker 1: of human reasoning and uh and and human problem solving.

1135
01:02:00,520 --> 01:02:03,040
Speaker 1: By the way, coming back to the Name of the Rose,

1136
01:02:03,440 --> 01:02:06,040
Speaker 1: I want to point out that there is apparently a

1137
01:02:06,520 --> 01:02:12,000
Speaker 1: highly regarded Spanish eight bit computer game based on the

1138
01:02:12,080 --> 01:02:15,000
Speaker 1: name of the Road. Yeah, it's a It's titled The

1139
01:02:15,040 --> 01:02:18,440
Speaker 1: Abbey of the Crime, which was actually uh and they

1140
01:02:18,440 --> 01:02:20,840
Speaker 1: conceived it as an adaptation of the Name of the Rose,

1141
01:02:20,880 --> 01:02:23,400
Speaker 1: but they were unable to secure permission to do so,

1142
01:02:24,000 --> 01:02:26,240
Speaker 1: and they in fact, I read that they didn't even

1143
01:02:26,320 --> 01:02:28,000
Speaker 1: hear back from Echo. They tried to get a touch

1144
01:02:28,040 --> 01:02:29,720
Speaker 1: of them and they couldn't get hold of it. And

1145
01:02:29,840 --> 01:02:33,080
Speaker 1: try to imagine the umberto Echo essay about this video game,

1146
01:02:33,200 --> 01:02:37,920
Speaker 1: like when he tries to play it, that would be good. Uh.

1147
01:02:38,000 --> 01:02:40,720
Speaker 1: But basically the Abbey of the Crime. The title they

1148
01:02:40,720 --> 01:02:43,800
Speaker 1: went with was apparently like the working title for the

1149
01:02:43,880 --> 01:02:46,760
Speaker 1: Name of the Rose at one point, um, so they

1150
01:02:46,840 --> 01:02:48,760
Speaker 1: released it under that name, and instead of having the

1151
01:02:48,800 --> 01:02:51,800
Speaker 1: main character be William of Baskerville, the main character is

1152
01:02:52,080 --> 01:02:55,000
Speaker 1: William of Alcolm and uh. And I thought that was

1153
01:02:55,240 --> 01:02:56,800
Speaker 1: pretty much the int to it. You know, you can

1154
01:02:56,840 --> 01:02:58,920
Speaker 1: look up the footage of the game and all. But

1155
01:02:59,040 --> 01:03:01,960
Speaker 1: then I just learned for the first time this may

1156
01:03:02,000 --> 01:03:05,080
Speaker 1: be more common knowledge for everyone else out there. Um,

1157
01:03:06,000 --> 01:03:07,800
Speaker 1: there is a remake of it, like they did, like

1158
01:03:07,840 --> 01:03:11,600
Speaker 1: a revamped version of it with improved but nicely pixelated graphics.

1159
01:03:12,160 --> 01:03:15,960
Speaker 1: Uh the Abbey of the Crime Extensive, which you can

1160
01:03:16,000 --> 01:03:18,880
Speaker 1: get on Steam. Apparently I don't really do Steam, so

1161
01:03:18,920 --> 01:03:21,040
Speaker 1: I don't really know how it works, but um, yeah,

1162
01:03:21,080 --> 01:03:24,040
Speaker 1: it's listed on there. Came out in and it looks

1163
01:03:24,080 --> 01:03:27,000
Speaker 1: really cool like the for instance, now the the updated

1164
01:03:27,000 --> 01:03:30,440
Speaker 1: sprites the little characters in the game, they look so

1165
01:03:30,560 --> 01:03:34,560
Speaker 1: much like the actors in the original film adaptation to

1166
01:03:34,600 --> 01:03:36,200
Speaker 1: the Name of the Rose, Like it's a little Sean

1167
01:03:36,240 --> 01:03:39,280
Speaker 1: Connery and Christians later. Yeah, I don't know if they

1168
01:03:39,360 --> 01:03:42,120
Speaker 1: got permission to use their likenesses. Um, how close does

1169
01:03:42,120 --> 01:03:44,160
Speaker 1: it have to be in eight bits? I don't know.

1170
01:03:44,280 --> 01:03:48,520
Speaker 1: That's that's a great question. But but my other question

1171
01:03:48,560 --> 01:03:50,360
Speaker 1: is just I would like to ask listeners out there,

1172
01:03:50,360 --> 01:03:53,520
Speaker 1: if you've played this, please let me know how it is.

1173
01:03:53,560 --> 01:03:55,960
Speaker 1: I'm very curious, not that I think I will actually

1174
01:03:55,960 --> 01:03:59,400
Speaker 1: play it for myself, but I just I'm genuinely genuinely

1175
01:03:59,440 --> 01:04:02,880
Speaker 1: interested in, uh, in what a video game adaptation to

1176
01:04:02,920 --> 01:04:04,560
Speaker 1: the Name of the Rose is like. If you know

1177
01:04:04,640 --> 01:04:06,280
Speaker 1: the solution at the end of the book, can you

1178
01:04:06,280 --> 01:04:09,320
Speaker 1: automatically beat the game immediately, like yeah, or are there

1179
01:04:09,400 --> 01:04:12,800
Speaker 1: different solutions? I don't know, Uh, you know, is it

1180
01:04:12,920 --> 01:04:15,280
Speaker 1: a different murder each time? That would be crazy. Arrives

1181
01:04:15,320 --> 01:04:18,400
Speaker 1: at the abbey, speaks to the abbot immediately says, I

1182
01:04:18,440 --> 01:04:22,160
Speaker 1: got something to lay on you. Is Occam's razor a

1183
01:04:22,160 --> 01:04:24,760
Speaker 1: an item that you can pick up like a plus

1184
01:04:24,800 --> 01:04:27,360
Speaker 1: one Ocom's razor that can then be employed in combat.

1185
01:04:27,400 --> 01:04:29,920
Speaker 1: It's like the Master Sword. Yeah, surely there is not

1186
01:04:30,040 --> 01:04:33,040
Speaker 1: combat in this game. I should hope not. I should

1187
01:04:33,040 --> 01:04:40,080
Speaker 1: hope it's just a lot of talking. Um. Yeah, I

1188
01:04:40,200 --> 01:04:43,200
Speaker 1: cast the poverty of Christ on you. Well. In the

1189
01:04:43,240 --> 01:04:45,480
Speaker 1: screenshot I was looking at does look like, um, the

1190
01:04:45,520 --> 01:04:49,480
Speaker 1: main character Baskerville slash Atom does have a pair of spectacles,

1191
01:04:49,760 --> 01:04:52,480
Speaker 1: but then there's like one to three they're there are

1192
01:04:52,560 --> 01:04:55,680
Speaker 1: multiple empty spots here. So I guess he gets other stuff.

1193
01:04:55,720 --> 01:04:59,160
Speaker 1: I mean, I guess various books and whatnot, some of

1194
01:04:59,200 --> 01:05:03,360
Speaker 1: them and juice. Uh, probably some cheese, some cheese or

1195
01:05:03,480 --> 01:05:06,160
Speaker 1: that gets like some fried cheese at some point, yeah,

1196
01:05:06,160 --> 01:05:09,240
Speaker 1: I think so, but mostly books, mostly books. All right?

1197
01:05:09,880 --> 01:05:12,120
Speaker 1: So there you have at alcams Raiser. Hopefully we're able

1198
01:05:12,120 --> 01:05:14,520
Speaker 1: to to lay it out for you um, you know,

1199
01:05:14,760 --> 01:05:17,720
Speaker 1: an explanation of what what Alcom's razor is, where it

1200
01:05:17,760 --> 01:05:21,920
Speaker 1: came from, uh, some of the various opinions on its usefulness.

1201
01:05:22,880 --> 01:05:25,280
Speaker 1: You know it's so you can take the tool, put

1202
01:05:25,280 --> 01:05:27,040
Speaker 1: it back into the tool chest, and know a little

1203
01:05:27,040 --> 01:05:28,680
Speaker 1: a little bit more about it the next time you

1204
01:05:29,080 --> 01:05:32,000
Speaker 1: pull it out and go to use it. In the meantime,

1205
01:05:32,000 --> 01:05:33,720
Speaker 1: if you want to check out other episodes of Stuff

1206
01:05:33,760 --> 01:05:35,560
Speaker 1: to Blow Your Mind, go to stuff to Blow your

1207
01:05:35,560 --> 01:05:37,760
Speaker 1: Mind dot com. That'll shoot you over to the I

1208
01:05:37,880 --> 01:05:40,880
Speaker 1: Heart listing for this podcast. But ultimately you can find

1209
01:05:40,880 --> 01:05:44,040
Speaker 1: this podcast wherever you get your podcast. We don't care

1210
01:05:44,040 --> 01:05:46,320
Speaker 1: where that is, wherever it happens to be. Just make

1211
01:05:46,320 --> 01:05:48,680
Speaker 1: sure that you subscribe, that you rate through your review.

1212
01:05:49,000 --> 01:05:51,280
Speaker 1: These are the things that help us out huge thanks

1213
01:05:51,320 --> 01:05:54,760
Speaker 1: as always to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson.

1214
01:05:55,080 --> 01:05:56,560
Speaker 1: If you would like to get in touch with us

1215
01:05:56,560 --> 01:05:58,960
Speaker 1: with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest

1216
01:05:59,000 --> 01:06:01,360
Speaker 1: a topic for the future, just to say hi, you

1217
01:06:01,400 --> 01:06:04,240
Speaker 1: can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your

1218
01:06:04,240 --> 01:06:13,800
Speaker 1: Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a

1219
01:06:13,840 --> 01:06:16,600
Speaker 1: production of iHeart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts

1220
01:06:16,640 --> 01:06:19,600
Speaker 1: from my Heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts,

1221
01:06:19,680 --> 01:06:30,360
Speaker 1: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.