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