0:05

Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name is

0:07

Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick,

0:10

and it's Saturday. Time to go into the vault for a

0:12

classic episode of the show. This one originally

0:14

published on February and

0:17

it's about Acam's Razor. Yeah,

0:20

this one, this one is a lot of fun we get into. You

0:22

know, we discussed scientific thinking and speculative

0:24

thinking. Uh, we discussed the

0:27

name of the rose a little bit for obvious

0:29

reasons that this one was fun. There's some

0:31

some history, some science. Everything you

0:33

want. Dr wonderful.

0:38

Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind, a production of I

0:40

Heart Radios How Stuff Work.

0:48

Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is

0:50

Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick.

0:53

And today we're going to discuss a problem

0:55

solving principles that many of you have probably

0:57

heard of and that we've we've definitely

1:00

referenced on the show before, and that is Acom's

1:02

Razor. That's right, it's it's one of the classics,

1:05

one of the hits of like the Skeptical tool Kit,

1:07

and uh, I think it's a really good one to get

1:10

into because it's something that is widely

1:12

known, but in different ways and

1:14

often uh. To whatever extent

1:16

it actually does have value, it

1:19

often gets deployed in ways that do not actually

1:21

make use of its value, right, Like

1:24

like an actual razor blade may be misused

1:26

from time to time. Now,

1:29

one specific place that I know we've talked about it before

1:31

is that is in the context of Carl

1:34

Sagan's recommendations for

1:36

the tools of skeptical thinking. Uh.

1:39

He lays these out, and one of

1:41

them is Occam's razor. He writes, Occam's

1:43

razor. This convenient rule of thumb

1:45

urges us, when faced with two hypotheses

1:48

that explain the data equally well,

1:50

to choose the simpler. Okay,

1:53

Now, why do we end up talking about this today. We

1:55

were in the studio the other day, uh,

1:57

discussing upcoming episodes, and you said that Seth

2:00

mentioned this, our our producer, Seth. Yeah. I was in

2:02

here and Seth Nicholas Johnson

2:04

was working on a crossword puzzle. Was

2:06

it the New York Times? He tells us

2:08

it was The New York Times? Uh, And he

2:11

he asked me how to spell okam is an Ockham's

2:13

razor? And I took

2:15

a guess. At it and I can't.

2:17

I can't remember I was correct. I was probably wrong,

2:19

but also probably hit one of the multiple acceptable

2:22

spellings for Ockhams raiser um.

2:24

But anyway, we started talking about it and I was like, oh,

2:26

yeah, we could do that as an episode, and

2:28

so here we are. I'm very glad we picked this because

2:31

I think one of my personal favorite genres

2:33

of critical thinking is

2:35

is being skeptical about the tools of skepticism.

2:38

You know, is sometimes people who

2:40

identify as skeptics can can

2:42

I get a little cocky? You know, they get a little

2:44

too sure of themselves about what the reasoning

2:47

tools they use, and it's worth putting

2:49

those tools to the test, giving them a closer

2:51

look. Yeah. Absolutely, Now

2:53

I have to say that I definitely remember the first

2:55

time I encountered the concept of Ockham's

2:58

raz or, at least the first time I encounter unded

3:00

it, and it on some level stuck with me.

3:02

And that was when I view the film

3:05

adaptation of Carl Sagan's novel Contact.

3:10

The movie I can't watch without crying. Oh

3:12

yeah, yeah, well why does it make you

3:14

cry? Oh God, there's

3:17

no no, It's just it's pointed, like

3:19

especially the first part where you

3:21

know, it zooms out from the earth and you're hearing

3:23

the radio signals go back in time, and

3:26

then and then it shows the young Ellie air

3:28

Away experimenting with the ham radio and

3:30

her dad's helping her, and I get so emotional.

3:33

I don't know, yeah, yeah, it's

3:35

it's been a very long I haven't seen it since

3:37

it initially came out, And in

3:39

fact, the main thing I remember from

3:41

it is this scene in which Jodie

3:43

Foster's character Eleanor air

3:45

Away has having this conversation

3:48

with Matthew McConaughey's character. Who

3:50

how old was Matthew McConaughey at this point, I

3:52

don't even know how old he is now he's just like

3:54

this ageless demon. But

3:56

anyway, he has his character, he's playing his character

3:58

named Palmer Joss. Uh huh. And in

4:00

the scene in question, Foster's character

4:03

brings up Acam's raiser in a

4:05

discussion on the nature of God. She

4:07

she says, well, which is ultimately

4:09

the simpler hypothesis than an all

4:12

powerful God exists or the human

4:14

beings made God up in order to feel

4:16

better about things, and then

4:19

this ultimately comes back around is kind of flipped

4:21

on her later on in the film regarding her

4:23

characters encounter with an extraterrestrial

4:26

intelligence. Right, is it more likely that

4:28

she really had the experience she thinks she had

4:30

with with all these aliens or

4:32

that she like hallucinated something that would

4:34

give her emotional closure. Yeah, and

4:36

so yeah, I think I was in high school at the time,

4:38

so it was It was an interesting concept, especially

4:41

in the context of atheism

4:43

versus you know, faith in a creator

4:46

deity. Uh. To to suddenly have this

4:48

tool from the chest of skeptical thinking just

4:50

thrown up on the table and you and seemingly

4:53

used by both sides. Well, yeah, I think

4:55

this is funny. This is a great example because

4:58

it highlights some of the most common features

5:00

of Occam's razor as it is actually used,

5:02

Like it's often invoked in

5:04

a kind of fuzzy way, like without

5:07

an objective measure, uh,

5:09

just kind of invoked to back

5:11

up your intuitions about the probability

5:14

of something. Right. But another thing is

5:16

that this example shows how it's not always

5:18

easy to find a way to compare the

5:20

simplicity of two different propositions,

5:23

like is the existence of God a

5:25

simple hypothesis or a complicated

5:27

one that I think that really depends

5:30

on kind of how you feel about it,

5:32

like like what kind of objective measure

5:34

can you come up with to evaluate that question?

5:36

Right, It's going to depend so much on your like

5:39

your background, your culture, what you grew up

5:41

with, and just how you how

5:43

you've come to view the possibility of of

5:46

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

5:48

of your your worldview or

5:50

is it this thing from the outside

5:53

that you are contemplating. And also how

5:55

do you view it, like the coherence

5:57

of the idea. Do you view it as something that's

5:59

like, uh, that's full of all these little

6:01

kind of ad hoc accommodations,

6:04

or something that is a holistic, coherent

6:07

sort of like fact about nature, you

6:09

know, it's I think this is

6:11

a perfect example that shows like when

6:14

people use the idea of Okham's razor

6:16

in a way that is not helpful and

6:18

doesn't really it doesn't really get you any closer

6:20

to figuring out what's true. Now if you're one, If

6:23

if you're still questioning like what the

6:25

concept really means, don't worry.

6:27

We will get to some I think some some very

6:29

understandable examples of how it can be

6:32

used properly and used improperly.

6:35

But let's go ahead and to start about the

6:37

concept itself the word

6:40

acum uh. And you know where

6:43

this comes from. We'll get to the origins of akamas

6:45

razor. So Acam's razor is also

6:47

known as the principle of parsimony,

6:50

and parsimony means a tendency toward

6:52

cheapness or frugality. So

6:55

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

6:57

like, you want to be cheap with your with your

6:59

logic, right, yeah, I don't need more

7:01

than two steps of logic between me and the

7:03

solution. Uh. You know, don't give

7:06

me one with four or five uh.

7:08

And it was named after the medieval English

7:10

philosopher William of Ockham, of course,

7:12

William of Ockom Uh. So he

7:14

he lived in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries,

7:17

from twelve eighty five to either thirteen

7:19

forty seven or thirteen forty nine. I've seen

7:21

different death dates given for

7:23

him. I've seen different birthdates as well.

7:26

At twelve eighty seven or twelve eighty eight,

7:28

That's what I was looking at. That's interesting. So

7:30

he was a prolific scholar Franciscan

7:32

friar. We'll get more into his ideas in

7:34

a minute. You know, one thing I've always wondered

7:37

is where the heck is Ocum. I've never heard of that.

7:39

Well, yeah, because the words sound it has kind of like

7:41

a remoteness to it. It sounds alien

7:43

in some ways. Akom is very

7:45

much a real place. It is a rural village

7:48

in Surrey, England. You can look it up

7:50

online. You can find out the website for

7:52

the church in Ocum, for example.

7:55

And this area has been occupied since ancient

7:57

times. It's about a day's ride south

8:00

best of London, and it was

8:02

the birthplace of the individual

8:04

who had come to be known as William of Ockham.

8:06

Now beyond that, beyond the fact that

8:08

he was born here, we don't know

8:10

a lot about William's life. Uh.

8:13

We don't know what his social or family

8:15

background was, or if his native

8:18

language was French or Middle English.

8:20

As Paul Vincent Spade explains

8:22

in The Cambridge Companion to Ockham,

8:25

he was likely given over to the Franciscan

8:27

Order as a young boy before the age

8:29

of fourteen, and here Latin

8:32

would have quickly become his language of

8:34

of of not only writing, but also just conversation.

8:37

Gray Friar's convent in London was likely

8:40

his home convent, but later

8:42

he traveled. He visited Avignon,

8:44

he visited Italy, and he lived the last

8:46

two decades of his life in Germany. Now,

8:49

philosophically, William was

8:51

a nominalist, and Spade

8:54

writes that the two main themes of

8:56

this for William were the rejection

8:58

of universals and ontological

9:01

reduction. And these two themes

9:03

are are not necessarily interconnected,

9:05

like you can you could, you could believe in one

9:07

but not the other, you know, and vice versa um.

9:10

But basically let's

9:13

let's get into what these means. So the

9:15

first, the rejection of universals

9:17

is perhaps best considered, and this

9:19

is very brief and broad. Certainly

9:21

you can find so much

9:24

written and set on this topic, but basically,

9:26

think of it as a rejection of the Platonic

9:29

idea of the realm of forms.

9:31

So that idea that all chairs that we might

9:33

make, the whom I design and carve

9:35

and a symbol are an attempt to create the

9:37

perfect chair, which doesn't reside

9:39

in our world, but only resides within this realm

9:42

of forms. So all chairs

9:44

that we create are like an aspiration for the ideal

9:46

chair. Another way I've thought about it, at least

9:49

as I understood it, was that nominalism is kind

9:51

of the idea that there is no such

9:53

thing as a chair. There's only this

9:55

chair and that chair and this chair

9:57

over here. There is no chair

10:00

right like this. This is the kind of the situation one

10:02

gets it too when you get into like

10:05

the genre classifications of say

10:07

albums, artists or movies that

10:09

you care a great deal about, and

10:12

someone tries to limit it to a classification

10:14

and say, oh, well, that's classic rock or that's alternative

10:17

rock, and you're like, no, no, no, no no, no, you

10:19

don't. Don't try and fit that. There is there

10:21

is. These categories do not apply. There

10:24

is There is only you know, whatever your band

10:26

of choice happens to be. That, there is only tool, There

10:28

is only primus or whatever. Right there, Yeah,

10:30

there there is only things, not categories.

10:33

Now let's move on to the second theme here,

10:35

ontological reduction. This

10:37

is, as Britannica defines it, quote,

10:40

the metaphysical doctrine that entities

10:42

of a certain kind are, in reality collections

10:45

or combinations of entities of simpler

10:48

or more basic kind. I think your

10:50

classic example here is molecules

10:52

atoms. Yeah. So

10:55

another example here's while our Aristotle

10:58

defined ten categories of objects

11:00

that might be apprehended by a

11:03

human mind, and these would have been uh

11:05

translations, very on on how

11:07

you wanted to find these. But substance, quantity,

11:10

quality, relative place, time,

11:12

attitude, condition, action, and affection.

11:15

William cut these down to two substance

11:17

and quality. He's really getting in there. That's

11:20

the razor. That's what a razor does. It

11:22

just it slices away, It cuts off the fat

11:25

and gets down to the meat. Spade writes,

11:27

quote. Although these two strands

11:29

of Acam's thinking are independent, they

11:31

are nevertheless often viewed as joint

11:33

effects of a more fundamental concern,

11:36

the principle of parsimony, known as

11:38

Acam's razor. Okay, so we're getting

11:40

to the razor here. Yeah. So William devoted

11:43

a lot of energy to arguing against

11:46

what Spade calls the bloated ontological

11:49

inventories of his contemporaries,

11:52

and he became well known to his peers

11:54

for this as such, either

11:56

towards the end of his life or shortly

11:59

after his death, a kind of Greatest

12:01

Hits album came out on

12:04

his Thoughts and Ideas titled on

12:06

the Principles of Theology. Now it

12:08

wasn't actually by William of Ockham,

12:11

but it featured his doctrine as well as

12:13

verbatim quotes. There was no

12:15

ascribed author either, so

12:17

later generations would often just attribute

12:19

it to him um as well as

12:21

the notion of Akham's razor. Uh.

12:24

However, this specific phrase was

12:26

apparently never actually used by

12:28

him. He never said Ackham in the house,

12:30

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

12:33

on some uh some some some

12:35

some ideas here. No, this is something that is

12:37

attributed by others to his work. Yeah,

12:39

Okham's razor is a is a name

12:41

for this principle that is

12:44

supposed to be kind of a summation of

12:46

several different thoughts he articulated

12:48

in different ways. Yes, yeah, he summed

12:50

it up in different different manners.

12:53

Uh. In Spade includes includes a few examples of

12:55

this in his work. For instance, here, here's some quotes

12:57

from Akam. Beings are not to be multiplied

13:00

beyond necessity or

13:02

plurality, is not to be a positive

13:05

without necessity or what

13:07

can happen through fewer principles happens

13:09

in Vain through more and there are

13:11

other there are other examples

13:14

of this as well. We're basically saying the same

13:16

thing, but maybe like it just comes

13:18

off a little flower at least in translations. Yeah,

13:20

I think the the simple version you

13:22

could get to the summarizing

13:24

some of his abuse here, like, uh, don't

13:27

make assumptions you don't have to, don't

13:30

pile on explanations that are

13:32

not necessary. Yeah, and also

13:34

just don't take more steps they are necessary

13:36

to get from point A to point B than your reasoning

13:39

and in your hypothesis. And

13:41

the way this usually gets translated into

13:43

modern thinking, as we've talked about before, is

13:45

that when you've got competing explanations,

13:48

it's better to tend towards the simpler one,

13:51

the one that makes fewer assumptions, rather

13:53

than the more complicated one that makes more assumptions.

13:56

Now here's another fun fact about

13:59

William of Aucham. William Ackom

14:01

is key to Elmberto Echo's excellent

14:03

novel The Name of the Rose. Uh.

14:06

This was a novel that was published

14:08

in nineteen eighty. Many of you may be familiar

14:10

with the certainly the the film

14:12

adaptation that starred Sean Connery,

14:14

f Murray, Abraham Um, Christian

14:17

Slater in a host of wonderful character actors.

14:19

And then there was there's a more recent mini

14:21

series adaptation with John Taturo that I have

14:23

not seen, but I should probably

14:25

see at some point or another. But anyway, the

14:28

main character in Echoes

14:30

novel is William of Baskerville, who

14:32

is in many ways similar. He's a Franciscan

14:35

friar. He's got a kind of empirical

14:37

streak. Yeah, he's basically

14:39

a mash up of William of

14:41

Ockam and Sherlock Holmes, thus

14:44

the Baskerville alluding to uh

14:47

Hound of the Baskerville's. Then

14:49

the title itself, the Name of the Rose,

14:51

has has been interpreted as being a reference

14:54

to Acom's uh nominalism.

14:56

There is no one rose. There is only

14:58

the Name of the Rose. But they're

15:00

also other I think interpretations on it, and it's

15:02

meant to be kind of cryptic. Now according

15:05

to I was reading more about this, and it's been

15:07

been a little while since I've read In the Name of the Rose, you've

15:09

read it more recently than yes, Because we were misremembering.

15:11

We were thinking, now was it was? Was it the

15:13

case? In the book that William of Ockham was supposed

15:16

to be this fictional main character's

15:18

mentor. I somehow had that in my mind

15:20

as well. No, instead it was another medieval

15:23

scholastic thinker. It was Roger Bacon. So

15:26

so yes, Roger Bacon was William

15:29

of Baskerville's mentor, as opposed

15:31

to William of Acham, who I do not believe as

15:33

Ackam is actually mentioned in the

15:36

novel. So I

15:38

was reading a little bit more about this. There was a two thousand

15:40

eighteen article that came out in

15:42

Philosophy Now by Carol Nicholson

15:45

titled Acam's Rose, and

15:47

she pointed out that Echo had apparently explored

15:49

the possibility of simply using Ackam

15:51

as his main character in

15:54

in this novel, but he ultimately

15:56

quote did not find him a very attractive person.

15:59

And therefore, I mean, did that makes

16:01

sense right? If you're it's like, you can either lean

16:03

on a historical figure, or he can do something a

16:05

little more fun and do a mash

16:07

up of ACoM and the

16:10

Great Detective And ultimately, I mean, that's

16:12

one of the fun things about the novel is that

16:14

is that you do have these elements where it's a it's

16:17

Sherlock Holmes going up against bores,

16:19

you know, that kind of sort of thing. She writes,

16:22

Uh, this is interesting as well, just to

16:24

draw the parallel between William of Baskerville

16:26

and William of of Olcom. She writes,

16:28

quote in thirty seven, the year in

16:30

which the name of the Roses set, ACoM

16:33

faced fifty six charges of heresy

16:35

and was excommunicated after escaping the

16:37

protection of Emperor Louis of Bavaria.

16:40

This put an end to his academic career, and he spent

16:42

the rest of his life as a political activists,

16:44

advocating freedom of speech, the separation

16:47

of church and state, and arguing against

16:49

the infallibility of the pope. She

16:51

also points out that Ackom, like the

16:53

fictional William of Baskerville, likely

16:56

died of the plague. Alright,

16:58

on that note, we're going to take a quick break, but when we come

17:00

back we will continue our discussion

17:02

of Acams razor. Thank

17:07

alright, we're back, all right. So we've been talking about

17:09

this principle known as Akam's razor

17:12

that we've described already as the idea

17:14

that simpler hypotheses

17:16

are better than more complex hypotheses.

17:18

There are a number of ways you can formulate it. But

17:21

it's a principle that's been referred back to actually

17:23

since probably before William of Akam.

17:25

It is, I think, a principle that somewhat

17:27

predates him in intellectual history, right

17:29

right, He did not. He did not create something

17:32

that was not already utilized

17:35

by other thinkers of the day and thinkers before him.

17:38

One great example of somebody not before William

17:40

of Acham but later articulating similar

17:42

ideas is Isaac Newton in his great

17:44

work The Principia Mathematica. From Newton

17:48

writes, quote, we are to admit no

17:51

more causes of natural things

17:53

than such as are both true and sufficient

17:56

to explain their appearances. Uh

17:59

So, a similar idea is there's no need to

18:01

add extra explanations

18:03

when you already have an explanation that

18:05

is number one true and number

18:08

two explains everything you see.

18:10

Right. So, an example of this might

18:12

be why do the planets

18:14

orbit the Sun? This would be something that Newton

18:16

would be concerned with. Newton would say,

18:18

okay, we know of two forces that explain

18:21

what we see, gravity and inertia.

18:23

Inertia is the tendency of an object

18:26

in motion to stay in motion. Gravity

18:28

is the mutually attracting force between

18:30

two objects with mass. So, because

18:33

of inertia, the planets flying through

18:35

space want to keep traveling in a straight

18:37

line at a constant speed. And

18:39

because of gravity, instead of traveling

18:41

in a straight line, their path bends around

18:44

towards the Sun as they travel. And

18:46

so that those two things are both

18:48

true, and they explain everything we observed,

18:51

not now, actually not quite everything, but they

18:53

were good enough for Newton's time explaining everything.

18:56

You might also say, though, that maybe

18:58

in addition to gravi d and inertia, there

19:01

are angels that guide the planets

19:03

in their orbits because those elliptical

19:05

pathways are pleasing to the Lord. But

19:07

if somebody proposes that, you're you're kind

19:09

of stuck. Because there's no way to prove

19:12

the angel hypothesis wrong. You can't

19:14

say there aren't invisible angels guiding

19:16

the planets. But pretty much everybody

19:19

today, I think, even people who believe in angels

19:21

in some sense, would not see any

19:23

reason to believe that there are angels

19:26

doing that, because there are other

19:28

explanations which do all the explaining

19:30

that needs to be done. Right, Yeah, I

19:32

mean, once you drag angels into it too, it

19:34

it opens up the door for just a

19:37

never ending list of reasons why the

19:39

angels can't be detected or why the you

19:41

know, well, why the angel wanted why the planet

19:43

seems to be behaving this way. It's

19:45

in accordance with these known laws rather than

19:48

the machinations of a divine

19:50

being right, And you don't need to appeal

19:53

in any way to the additional plausibility

19:55

of angels or not. Like the reason I said

19:57

that even people who otherwise believe in angels

20:00

don't say that they're guiding the motions

20:02

of the planets is you don't need them to explain

20:04

that. And you've just got basic laws of

20:06

physics that explain what the planets are

20:09

doing. There's no reason to add an angel's

20:11

explanation. It doesn't do anymore work. Yeah,

20:13

it doesn't even help angels out. I

20:15

mean, yeah, it's there. There's

20:17

just no point in it now. Of course, sticking on the

20:19

theory of like the motions of the planets for a minute,

20:21

of course, we would have to later come up with

20:24

a more refined theory of gravity for those

20:26

rare cases where Newton's theory of gravity

20:28

would fail, And we would get that with

20:30

Einstein and general relativity,

20:32

which recharacterized gravity is the

20:34

curvature of space time caused

20:36

by deformation due to mass, rather than

20:38

as a mutually attractive force between objects,

20:41

though in most cases if you think of it as

20:43

a force in in the Newtonian sense,

20:45

your predictions work out just fine. But

20:47

from an article that I want to refer to later

20:50

by a philosopher named Elliott sober Uh,

20:52

he writes, quote Albert Einstein spoke

20:54

for many when he said quote, it can

20:56

scarcely be denied that the supreme

20:58

goal of all the rie is to make

21:01

the irreducible basic elements

21:03

as simple and as few as possible

21:05

without having to surrender the adequate

21:07

representation of a single datum of

21:09

experience, which in a way is

21:12

again articulating something like

21:14

Ockham's razor. It's saying like, you

21:16

want the simplest possible explanation

21:18

that explains everything. And if we're

21:20

sticking with Einstein for a minute, to

21:23

go beyond positing something like angels,

21:25

if if you want to go into real scientific hypotheses

21:28

in history, there are all kinds of things

21:30

that you might argue we're sort of done

21:32

away with by an Acam's

21:34

razor ish kind of process, though

21:37

I think there are some historians and philosophers

21:39

of science that might disagree there. But one example

21:41

that comes to my mind is the luminiferous ether.

21:44

You know, it was once believed by many

21:46

scientists that there had to be a medium

21:48

in space through which light propagates,

21:51

right, the same way that if you want sound

21:53

to propagate, there's no sound in space, right,

21:56

You've got to have sound traveling through

21:58

a medium like air, or like water,

22:00

or like a you know, like a steel wire.

22:03

There must be matter to transmit that

22:05

energy. And so the idea was that space

22:07

was filled with this stuff, this ether,

22:10

that light waves propagated through.

22:13

And eventually, due to Einstein and too other

22:15

thinkers and experiments it it started to become

22:18

clear that the ether was superfluous.

22:20

You didn't need it to explain any of

22:22

the properties of light. Now, there's another

22:24

example from history that often

22:27

comes up when people talk about Okham's razor.

22:29

It's often brought up as a great example

22:32

of Ockham's razor being applied. But

22:34

we're gonna get to an article later on that I

22:36

think has presents a pretty devastating case

22:38

against this being true. But just

22:40

to set it up here, it is the idea

22:43

of comparing the Ptolemaic universe

22:45

versus the Copernican universe, which obviously,

22:48

this argument was brought to

22:50

a very dramatic end UH

22:52

in the life of Galileo. Right Galileo got

22:54

into big trouble with the Inquisition for,

22:57

among other things, they were also politics involved,

22:59

but four, among other things, advocating the Copernican

23:02

model over the Polemic model.

23:05

UH. For simplicity's sake, the Copernican

23:07

model of the Solar System was of course the

23:09

one we know to be more basically correct,

23:11

not totally correct, but more correct because

23:13

it was heliocentric. It put the Sun at

23:16

the center of the Solar System and argued

23:18

that the other planets, including the Earth, all

23:20

rotated around the Sun. UH. This

23:22

of course was not the orthodox astronomy

23:24

of the day. The more favored models were the traditional

23:27

Toolemic model, which had the Earth

23:29

at the center and the the planets

23:31

all going around the Earth, and these strange

23:33

kind of spirograph patterns

23:36

that had these things called epicycles where they

23:38

would sort of stop and then do a circle and

23:40

another circle, and like loops within

23:42

their their traveling um. And

23:45

then you had some compromise models like the

23:47

model of Tycho Brahi. Now, the traditional

23:50

argument here in favor of saying, you know, Copernicus

23:52

and Galileo were on the side of Occam's

23:55

razor, it would go something like, well,

23:57

the Ptolemaic system and the and

23:59

the type Cobrahi models, they've got

24:01

all this extra stuff. You need to assume,

24:04

all these weird extra assumptions, like

24:06

like epicycles, you know, like where

24:08

the planets are going around in loops and it's not

24:10

explained exactly why they're doing that. You just

24:13

have to insert the loops in order

24:15

to make it match our are our observations,

24:18

and therefore the Tolemaic model was more

24:20

complex. We'll come back to that

24:22

later on, because I think now it's

24:24

going to be important to get into some

24:27

criticisms of Acams razor. You

24:29

know, if you go into especially a

24:31

lot of like kind of skeptic communities on the

24:33

Internet, you might sometimes see

24:35

people treating ocams razor as

24:37

if it is some kind of law of

24:40

nature, like referring to Akam's

24:42

razor in the same way you might refer to proven

24:45

theories about reality, uh,

24:47

such as you know, the equations describing

24:49

the action of gravity or something. Uh.

24:52

And so I think while OCAM's razor is an

24:54

interesting and sometimes useful skeptical

24:56

lens to apply, it is not

24:58

in fact a law of nature. And then there are a

25:00

couple of major branches of criticisms

25:02

of ye old razor. I think

25:05

the first would be like accusations

25:07

that it is often misunderstood

25:09

or misused. And then second there

25:11

would be actual attacks on the usefulness

25:13

of the razor, even when it is in its

25:15

supposedly true form. Now, the

25:17

first thing would be pretty simple, and it's just the idea

25:20

that Ockham's razor is misunderstood,

25:22

misquoted, misconstrued, misused.

25:25

Uh. I Actually I came across a funny

25:27

blog post that, of all things, pointed to a

25:29

quote from a mystery writer named

25:31

Harlan Coben. Uh mystery

25:34

writers, yeah, uh yeah,

25:36

I'm not familiar with this writer, but I thought

25:38

this was interesting this would you know? It was just an

25:40

example of somebody saying, no, you're not using

25:42

Ockham's razor, right, this writer wrote

25:44

quote, most people oversimplify Ockham's

25:46

razor to mean the simplest answer is

25:49

usually correct, but the real meaning

25:51

what the Franciscan Friar William of Oakin

25:53

really wanted to emphasize is that you shouldn't

25:55

complicate, that you shouldn't stack

25:58

a theory. If a simpler exploit nation

26:00

was at the ready, pare it down, prune

26:03

the excess. And so I think

26:05

looking at it this way, this fits more with like

26:07

the version that we were talking about

26:09

with Isaac Newton. Right. It's not

26:11

necessarily a statement about simplicity

26:14

as a general principle, but saying

26:16

that you shouldn't stack things that

26:18

explain the same outcomes on

26:20

top of each other because you get no

26:23

extra usefulness out of that. Another

26:26

example that I was just thinking of that's come up on

26:28

the show before is the idea of aquatic

26:30

ape theory. Oh yes, this is the idea

26:33

that, among other things, humans

26:35

are hairless because for a while

26:37

our our ancestors lived

26:40

at least partially in the water. Yeah. The ideas

26:43

you look at a lot of our body features are

26:45

relatively smooth skin, bipedalism,

26:48

layers of subcutaneous fat, uh,

26:51

the abilities of our vocal cords,

26:53

all kinds of things like that. The proponents

26:55

of aquatic ape theory say, hey,

26:57

we've got all these strange anatomical more

27:00

logical features that are not the same

27:02

as other great apes. Why do we have those

27:04

qualities? I think you could explain them

27:06

all if humans once needed to be

27:08

in the water, so they needed to be smooth.

27:10

You have smooth skin in order to be aerodynamic

27:13

swimmers, and they became bipedal

27:16

so that they could wade around in the water. And

27:18

you come up with a list of explanations along

27:20

these lines that they would argue all point

27:22

to an aquatic ancestry. But there's

27:24

a wrinkle there, because, of course, if

27:26

that's all true, the question is, then why

27:28

did we retain all those features

27:31

after leaving the water? You know, humans are not an

27:33

aquatic species now, I mean, we can go into

27:35

the water, but water is not our primary environmental

27:38

niche So what you know, how

27:40

can we still have all those features? And

27:43

the the aquatic ape theorists might say,

27:45

oh, well, once you came onto the land,

27:47

it actually was useful to be bipedal for these

27:49

other reasons, and which useful to be hairless

27:52

for these other reasons, which means you could

27:54

cut out an entire step of having to be in the

27:56

water to stick with these are useful for

27:58

living on the land exactly you, I'd apply ACAM

28:00

here and say, if those features turn out to be useful

28:03

on land, why wouldn't they just evolve

28:05

on land in the first place? Right, So

28:07

there is like you've you've you've been up then

28:09

creating or redirecting

28:12

to the hypothesis that is

28:14

one enormous step shorter. Yeah,

28:16

and so aquatic ape theory, I think is

28:18

one of those things that, like it

28:20

would be hard to completely disprove.

28:23

I think that there is no physical evidence

28:25

pointing toward it. It would be hard

28:27

to say this is impossible to

28:29

have happened, but there's just no reason

28:31

to assume it. It just it just like adds in

28:33

an extra step of explanations that

28:35

don't explain anything any better than

28:38

other explanations could. Yeah. I mean,

28:40

it's kind of like if I come home from

28:42

work and I have say beer

28:44

and bread. Uh, maybe

28:47

I stopped at two places to get the beer in the bread.

28:49

I got the beer at one place and the bread of the other, But

28:51

I also probably just stopped at one store

28:53

to get both of them. Both are likely

28:55

one is a shorter trip. I feel like you

28:57

would also have to add in something it kind

28:59

of extravagant that would be like you stopped

29:02

at the way home and you entered

29:04

a raffle contest in which you won

29:06

beer and bread. Uh. And then

29:08

you also may have stopped at the store, you

29:10

know, to get something else, but like, yeah,

29:13

I stole beer and bread, as like when the simple

29:15

explanation is probably probably just bought beer and bread.

29:17

Where beer and bread was was placed

29:19

in my car by a mysterious stranger. Like

29:22

these are all things that are possible and

29:25

could conceivably be the reason that I have

29:27

beer and bread in the car. But

29:30

OCAM's razor slices away

29:32

the unnecessary steps, the less

29:35

likely steps for the the shorter

29:37

trip between point and point B. Right. And

29:39

I think in cases like that, you could say

29:41

that ocums raizor doesn't necessarily prove

29:44

a theory wrong, but it is kind

29:46

of a useful heuristic. It might

29:48

help you use your intellectual

29:51

time wisely. Right. Uh.

29:53

But and and that gets us to the next step, which is

29:55

the more comprehensive criticism, the

29:58

idea that ACAM is maybe in act

30:00

wrong, more not useful. I think in some cases

30:03

this criticism is true, so maybe we should

30:05

get into it a bit. The first article I wanted

30:07

to look at is called The Tyranny

30:09

of Simple Explanations, and it was published

30:12

in the Atlantic. It was written by

30:14

the science writer Philip Ball, one of my favorite

30:16

current science writers, who wrote the book

30:18

Beyond Weird, a really fantastic book

30:20

about quantum physics that I recommended last summer.

30:23

This is one of your summer reading picks. I think, yeah, it's

30:25

really good. It's one of those books that you

30:28

may think you already you know, you've already read a quantum

30:30

physics book. You know, you know the basics, you

30:32

know, you know the the what the interpretations

30:34

are and all that. I feel like this is one you can

30:36

still be newly amazed by and learn

30:39

a lot more from and true

30:41

form as a great science writer. Ball

30:43

I think makes a fantastic case in this

30:45

article against Stockholm's razor,

30:47

against you know, a liberal use of it. So

30:51

he starts by saying, quote, Ockham's razor

30:53

is often stated as an injunction not to

30:55

make more assumptions than you absolutely

30:57

need. And in that way, it's

31:00

almost a truism, right, I mean, like, when

31:03

when you phrase it that way, who

31:05

would say, well, yeah, no, I want to make more

31:07

assumptions than I need. Yeah,

31:09

I mean you can come back to, like

31:11

a forensic example, right, detective

31:14

work, which even Carl Sagan makes

31:16

a discuss this a lot like committing science

31:19

to UH to the work of a detective,

31:21

like how many hypotheses

31:24

do you need for a murder? Right,

31:26

and you know there's gonna You're

31:28

gonna be the obvious ones that you

31:30

know, especially the acam's razer, are going to be

31:32

the primary candidates that it was someone the

31:34

victim knew, that it was, like a spouse

31:37

or a friend, etcetera. Uh, Rather

31:40

than inventing wild scenarios with

31:42

no evidence to base them on, right, saying,

31:44

you know, certainly getting into possible scenarios

31:46

like maybe it was the random work of

31:48

a serial murder. Serial murders

31:50

exist, this does happen from

31:53

time to time, but is it the most likely

31:55

scenario? And then that's not even getting

31:57

into wilder possibilities like well, perhaps

31:59

it was a an assassin, a spy

32:01

whom it's took them for another person. Well

32:03

that's possible too, but again, more

32:06

far more steps that are necessary, the the

32:08

shorter trip is the more likely.

32:11

Right, And in terms of not making

32:13

more assumptions than you need, ball rights

32:15

that this is of course good advice. If you're trying

32:17

to come up with a good explanation for something, you

32:19

add nothing by writing in a bunch

32:21

of extra complications that don't help

32:23

the explanation explain anything more

32:26

than it did when it was simpler. They should.

32:28

Explanations should be as simple as they can be

32:30

without losing power to explain and predict.

32:33

Quote. That's why most scientific

32:35

theories are intentional simplifications.

32:38

They ignore some effects, not because

32:40

they don't happen, but because they're

32:42

thought to have a negligible effect on the

32:44

outcome. Applied this way, simplicity

32:47

is a practical virtue allowing

32:50

a clearer view of what's most important

32:52

in a phenomenon. So again, he's saying

32:54

there that okhams Razor. It's it's

32:56

not necessarily that Okams razor tells

32:59

you what's true, but Acams

33:01

razor makes theories useful

33:04

because then he goes on to argue that Acam's razor

33:06

is quote fetishized and misapplied

33:08

as a guiding beacon for scientific inquiry.

33:11

So he thinks, what, you know, what we're just saying, Simplicity

33:14

is a virtue of theories and explanations because

33:16

they make theories clearer, easier

33:19

to use, but it's dangerous

33:21

to jump from that to the assumption that simplicity

33:24

is actually a measure of truth.

33:26

Quote here, the the implication is

33:28

the simplest theory isn't just more convenient,

33:31

but gets closer to how nature

33:33

really works. In other words,

33:35

it's more probably the correct. One Ball

33:38

says this is wrong is simplicity

33:40

does not actually tell you anything about

33:42

which theories are right and which ones

33:44

are wrong. He argues, there's really

33:47

no reason to believe that simpler theories

33:49

better described nature than complicated

33:51

ones, and he gives a few examples. He talks

33:54

about Francis Crick warning against

33:56

trying to apply Okham's razor as

33:58

a critical tool for theories and biology

34:00

because biology gets really messy,

34:02

and he cites examples where it kind of led

34:04

us astray. Like he he cites Alfred

34:07

Kempy's eighteen seventy nine proof

34:09

of the four color theorem and mathematics,

34:11

which was kind of favored for a while because the

34:14

proof was considered very simple and very

34:16

elegant, but it turned out to be wrong,

34:19

you know, very roughly. Here, it

34:21

makes me think of something we talked about before

34:23

in the show about how how

34:25

evolution is often

34:27

kind of a miser it's often cheap. Uh,

34:30

and so part of that you

34:32

could you could apply the simplicity model

34:34

to that and say, Okay, it's that

34:36

means it tends to take the shortest route, it

34:38

tends to to perhaps engage

34:41

in simplicity, but at the same time, uh,

34:44

it's kind of lazy, and lazy can create these

34:46

sort of messes where and yeah,

34:49

yeah, we're saying like some biological

34:51

structure has evolved, you know, for one

34:53

thing, but it ends up getting partially abandoned

34:55

and re used for something else, And it can

34:57

get it can get messy, it can get complicated. Million

35:00

years of shortcuts can turn into a

35:02

quite circuitous route. Yeah,

35:05

and so Ball rights that in his

35:07

view, he has not found a single

35:09

case in the history of science where Akham's

35:12

razor was actually used to settle

35:14

a debate between rival theories.

35:17

So I just want to make sure that his distinction

35:20

is coming through. He is saying, it's useful

35:22

for trying to make theories easier

35:24

to talk about, easier to understand, easier

35:27

to apply, But when it comes between

35:29

competing theories, trying to say which

35:31

one is more true which one makes better

35:34

predictions. He has not found

35:36

a single case where Okam's razor

35:38

was the decisive factor. And

35:40

what's worse, he says a lot of people have tried to retroactively

35:43

apply Ockham's razor to historical

35:45

scientific debates where it was not in fact

35:48

decisive in reality. Uh

35:50

And he cites as an example a debate we've already

35:52

discussed the geocentric versus the heliocentric

35:55

solar system. And I thought his take on this

35:57

was really interesting because I I had been taken

35:59

in. I think I had previously thought,

36:01

well, maybe a really good case of

36:03

Akham's razor is heliocentrism

36:06

winning over geocentrism, because with

36:08

geocentrism you just had to make all these weird

36:10

assumptions about the movements of planet. You had

36:12

to do extra work to make it fit, right,

36:15

That's what I thought. But he actually digs into

36:18

the debate of the time Ball points

36:20

out that in reality, So you know, we talked about

36:22

one of the big things being all these epicycles

36:24

that in the ptolemic model, the the geocentric

36:27

view, the planets go around the Earth,

36:29

but they don't just go around. They make all these weird loops

36:32

and stuff called epicycles. You had to

36:34

build that in in order to explain

36:36

what astronomers saw in the night sky, the planets

36:38

appearing to regress. They'd go back

36:40

and forth and stuff. Um

36:42

so, so he says, we've got all these epicycles.

36:45

But Ball points out that in reality, the Copernican

36:48

model that was being argued about in Galileo's

36:50

day, that heliocentric model, was also

36:53

full of epicycles. And this

36:55

was because Copernicus was not aware

36:57

of what Johannes Kepler would later discover

37:00

about the orbits of planetary bodies

37:02

being elliptical rather than circular.

37:05

So because he lacked that crucial

37:07

assumption that that important part of the theory,

37:09

Copernicus also had to build weird

37:12

little loops into his heliocentric

37:14

model of the Solar System. He got the heliocentrism

37:17

right, but he thought the planets were moving

37:19

in perfect circles that didn't match observations

37:22

either. So like Ptolemy, he he cheated.

37:24

He put all these loops in there to make

37:26

the model work out right, and it

37:28

wasn't until heliocentrism was

37:31

combined with Kepler and elliptical orbits

37:33

that the epicycles were finally banished,

37:35

and based on this, Ball argues that there

37:37

was really no way at the time to suggest that

37:39

the Copernican system was simpler.

37:42

In fact, he points out that Copernicus

37:44

invokes a number of weird, non

37:46

scientific assumptions in support of his

37:48

model. For example, quote uh,

37:51

in his main work on the heliocentric theory,

37:53

De revolutiontionibus, I'm

37:56

gonna have trouble with this one day revolutiontionibus

37:59

orbium celestium. Uh,

38:01

he argued that it was proper for the sun to

38:04

sit at the center quote, as if resting

38:06

on a kingly throne, governing

38:08

the stars like a wise ruler. That

38:11

doesn't sound like a very scientific criterion.

38:14

No, I mean, maybe he's kind of breaking it down

38:16

for people, you know. I mean, of course

38:18

he did turn out to be right, But like that,

38:20

that seems like an unjustified

38:23

assumption based on what he knew at

38:25

the time. Uh. Ball

38:27

also points out that by the time Kepler comes

38:29

around, we're no longer in a situation

38:31

of competing theories trying to explain

38:34

the same observations, because Kepler

38:36

had access to better observations.

38:39

Quote. The point here is that as a tool

38:41

for distinguishing between rival theories.

38:44

Occam's razor is only relevant

38:46

if the two theories predict identical

38:48

results, but one is simpler than

38:50

the other, which is to say, it makes

38:52

fewer assumptions. This is a situation

38:55

rarely, if ever, encountered in science.

38:58

Much more often theories are distinguish

39:00

not by making fewer assumptions, but different

39:03

ones. It's then not obvious

39:06

how to weigh them up. I think this is

39:08

a fantastic point, right, I think to come

39:10

back to the aquatic ape theory like that,

39:12

that is one of these rare situations. I think

39:14

that it seems to match up, right, it's making additional

39:17

assumptions, and it's like, oh, yeah, we would

39:19

have to keep those traits later anyway, we

39:21

need explanations for that. It just

39:23

seems like it's making more assumptions.

39:25

But that's almost never how it goes. Usually

39:27

the assumption is just different assumptions,

39:30

and then how do you know which assumption is simpler

39:32

than the other one? Right, the the

39:34

whole aquatic ape section of

39:36

the of presumed evolutionary

39:40

advancement is kind of its own epicycle.

39:42

Yeah, exactly removed because there's an epicycle

39:44

in this theory but not in this one exactly.

39:47

Yes, I mean, if you're trying to look

39:49

at like not additional assumptions

39:52

in the theory, but just different assumptions

39:54

in the theory. Even cases where

39:56

to us it might seem obvious one way or another,

39:59

which one seems simple, alert it's not always obvious

40:01

to people at the time. Uh he He

40:03

brings up the question of Darwinian

40:05

evolution, is descent from

40:07

a common ancestor more or

40:10

less complicated than the idea

40:12

of a divine created order common

40:14

descent? I think that would seem like a

40:16

less complicated theory to many of us today,

40:19

But would it have seemed simpler

40:21

to the world view of people who were debating common

40:23

descent in like the mid late nineteenth century.

40:26

Who you know, you've already got a theistic worldview

40:28

that's basically a built in assumption, right

40:30

right, Yeah, Yeah. A lot of this does come

40:32

down again coming to what we spoke about

40:34

earlier regarding the basic religious argument.

40:37

Like if you're coming from a really religious

40:40

background where we've had this um

40:42

this, you know, the the idea the reality

40:44

of a God hammered into you, and then you're

40:46

presented with with with the

40:48

atheist argument you know, you may say,

40:50

well know that that is that requires

40:53

far of there had so many epicycles

40:56

in your your your your atheism, where

40:58

my my face is just a

41:00

clear and straightforward as a whistle. I mean people

41:03

did actually argue that way. They'd say, look

41:05

at all this weird stuff you have to assume

41:07

about the history of life, and all I believe

41:09

is there's a divine created order. I

41:11

mean, that's it's like a moper sticker thing, like,

41:13

uh, what God, God wrote

41:15

it, I believe it in the story three steps

41:18

that theory, Yeah, it

41:20

is a simplicity is often in the eye

41:22

of the beholder, like you don't have I

41:25

mean, there are some people who would argue there are

41:27

cases where you can try to mathematically quantify

41:30

uh, complications or assumptions or simplicity,

41:33

but in general that's really hard to do. You don't

41:35

have an objective measure that you can

41:37

apply from the outside. A lot of times

41:39

it's just going to be kind of fuzzy qualitative

41:42

judgments. What what seems like

41:44

less of an assumption to you. You lack

41:46

an objective measure, people go with their intuitions.

41:49

Uh, and this does not seem like a good

41:51

recipe for sorting between theories.

41:54

So, coming back again to two balse formulation

41:57

of of Okham's razor, It's basically like, if you

41:59

have two theories that are competing

42:01

to explain the same things,

42:04

they make all the same predictions and explain

42:06

it equally well. Yeah, they explain that

42:08

they make the same predictions explain things equally

42:11

well. But one of them

42:13

has more assumptions, you go with the one with fewer

42:15

assumptions. But Ball argues that you

42:17

almost never, in reality get cases

42:19

where the predictions of two theories

42:22

are exactly the same. Instead

42:24

quote, scientific models that differ in

42:26

their assumptions typically make slightly

42:29

different predictions too. It is

42:31

these predictions, not the criteria

42:33

of simplicity, that are of the greatest

42:36

use for evaluating rival theories.

42:38

Again, I think this is a good point. I mean, theories

42:41

almost never predict the exact same

42:43

thing, so why not just judge them on how good

42:45

their predictions are. Uh.

42:48

Finally, he writes that he can only think

42:50

of one real instance in UH,

42:52

in science where there are rival theories

42:55

that make exactly the same predictions

42:57

on the basis of quote easily in new

43:00

morable and comparable assumptions.

43:02

And this one example he can think

43:04

of is the different interpretations of quantum

43:06

mechanics, which I think is a fantastic

43:09

example, and that did not come to my mind, but I think

43:11

he's exactly right about this. So

43:13

we've discussed interpretations of quantum mechanics

43:15

on the show before. We're not going to go deep

43:18

on that, but just for a very short refresher.

43:21

Basically, we know that the mathematical

43:23

fundamentals of quantum theory are correct.

43:25

They make extremely good predictions,

43:28

like we know the theories right, but there's

43:30

a problem. They predict a

43:32

world of probabilities, not of

43:34

certainties. So if you have a

43:36

theory that predicts an electron will

43:38

be fifty percent in one state and

43:40

fifty percent in an opposite state, but

43:43

we only ever observe physical reality

43:45

embodying one state at a time, how

43:47

do you resolve that it just does not match

43:50

our experience of reality. So

43:52

that's where the interpretations of quantum mechanics

43:54

come in. There they're trying to reconcile this difference,

43:57

explaining why the indeterministic,

44:00

hobbabilistic quantum world somehow resolves

44:02

into the solid deterministic

44:04

world that we experience every day.

44:07

And there are tons of interpretations. You've got like the

44:09

classic Copenhagen interpretation, which

44:11

predicts that objects exist in

44:13

a kind of in a state of superposition

44:15

until something interacts with them and collapses

44:18

the way of function makes them assume

44:20

one state or the other. You've got the now

44:23

popular many worlds interpretation,

44:25

originating with the physicist you Ever at the Third

44:27

in the late nineteen fifties. This suggests

44:30

that reality is constantly splitting

44:32

into infinite alternate timelines

44:34

based on the different possible outcomes

44:37

of unresolved quantum states. And

44:39

and we only observe one outcome because

44:41

we are also splitting, and the current version

44:43

of us is only one of many uses

44:46

that experiences one world at a time.

44:48

And then you've got a bunch of other theories to Basically,

44:50

these interpretations make exactly

44:53

the same physical predictions. No

44:55

matter which one of them is correct, the outcomes

44:57

of our experiments will be exactly the s

45:00

aim, so there's no way to test which

45:02

one is right. Though, And in a funny

45:04

turn, Ball points out that Ockham's razor

45:06

has been invoked both for and against

45:09

the many worlds interpretation, again

45:11

coming back to the fact that a lot of times this just comes

45:13

down to people's intuitive judgments,

45:16

like he quotes the quantum theorist role in omnus

45:18

quote, as far as economy of thought is

45:20

concerned, there never was anything

45:23

in the history of thought so bluntly

45:25

contrary to Ockham's rule than ever

45:27

it's many worlds. On

45:30

the other hand, you've got a modern physicist

45:32

like Sean Carroll of of Caltech who advocates

45:34

the many world's interpretation, specifically

45:37

because he argues it's the simplest

45:39

interpretation of quantum theory. He

45:41

says, it doesn't make any additional assumptions.

45:43

It's the simplest way you can map the

45:45

theory onto reality. The weird

45:48

thing about about this, too, is that I

45:50

feel like, at this point, if you consume

45:52

enough science fiction, and not even

45:54

just science fiction but general just popular culture,

45:57

the many World's interpretation has been and

45:59

you did, at least casually so often,

46:02

then in a way it feels slightly

46:05

more plausible, just because just due

46:07

to familiarity, which I realized is

46:09

not a scientific argue, like you could not you could

46:11

not reasonably say, well, I leaned

46:13

towards many worlds interpretation because that's

46:15

how The X Men works. My favorite TV

46:18

show uses it. It's got to be real, but

46:20

on on some like level, it's still kind of

46:22

good. Gets into you, it still affects you. I

46:24

agree. I mean again, I think this is this is pointing

46:26

out some of the weaknesses and how Alcam's razor

46:29

is often applied. It's like people think

46:31

they're applying some kind of objective criterion

46:33

when really they're just kind of going with their gut

46:36

about like what what feels more plausible?

46:39

Uh. And and that's something

46:41

Ball kind of hammers home at the end when he writes quote,

46:43

but this is all just special pleading. Acam's

46:46

razor was never meant for pairing nature

46:48

down to some beautiful, parsimonious

46:51

core of truth. Because science

46:53

is so difficult and messy, the allure

46:55

of a philosophical tool for clearing a path

46:58

or pruning the thickets is obvious. Yes, in

47:00

the readiness to find spurious applications

47:03

of Akham's razors in the history of science,

47:05

or to enlist, dismiss, or reshape the

47:07

razor at will to shore up their preferences.

47:10

Scientists reveal their seduction by

47:12

this vision, but they should resist it.

47:15

The value of keeping assumptions to a minimum

47:17

is cognitive not ontological.

47:20

It helps you think a theory

47:23

is not better if it is simpler,

47:25

but it might well be more useful, and

47:27

that counts for much more. Yeah,

47:29

that's well put. It helps us think, read

47:32

it, and help us explain the world. Right, there's

47:35

no way to show that well. Actually,

47:37

so we're about to get into somebody who says

47:39

that there may be cases where you can show simpler

47:41

theories are objectively more true. But

47:44

but Ball argues that at least most of the time

47:47

in science and real competing theories

47:49

in the history of science, it's not that

47:51

simpler theories are more true or

47:53

explain reality better. They're just

47:56

easier to get your head around and test.

47:58

All right, on that note, we're gonna take one more break,

48:01

but we will be right back with further discussion

48:03

of the razor. Alright,

48:08

we're back, All right. There's one more article about Akham's

48:11

razor that I found really interesting, very

48:13

useful, and it is called why is

48:15

Simpler Better? This was published in

48:17

Eon by Elliott Sober, who is

48:19

a professor of philosophy at the University

48:21

of Wisconsin, Madison, and he's

48:23

published a lot on the philosophy of science,

48:26

specifically as it applies to biology

48:28

and natural selection, and he wrote

48:30

a book on the subject of Akham's razor. Uh.

48:33

So he starts off, I think this

48:35

is kind of interesting talking about simplicity and

48:37

complexity and art. Could

48:39

you possibly have a norm that one

48:41

is always better than the other? I

48:44

mean that seems kind of strange, right, Like we

48:46

love simple art and we love complex

48:48

art, and it would be strange to find a person

48:50

who just wants one or the other. Yeah,

48:53

I mean this makes me think of

48:56

of movie posters. I don't know, you probably

48:58

remember it seems like it was a few year is back. The

49:01

big craze for

49:03

a while was that the designers would

49:05

come up with a super simplistic movie

49:08

poster for classic film

49:10

or a you know, a fan favorite film.

49:12

And it was really fun for a while. And

49:15

uh and but then it kind of overstate it's welcome,

49:17

you know, and and and it just became kind

49:19

of, at least to me anyway, kind of kind of irritating

49:22

to even look at. You're like, no, I don't don't want

49:24

to see like this film reduced to this ultra

49:26

simplistic symbol. I know exactly

49:29

what you're talking about. And I think there was a counter reaction.

49:31

Yeah, because then you started to see a lot of graphic

49:33

design for redoing old

49:35

movies with new posters in the kind of Return

49:38

of the Jedi stuff where there's a bunch

49:40

of stuff, there's like a bunch of people on the poster

49:42

and things happening. Yeah, or that it's

49:44

just kind of like a geometric explosion

49:47

of things, you know. Uh so, yeah,

49:49

you so saw the pendulum swing both ways.

49:51

But in general, yeah, I feel like it's that way

49:53

in art. I mean, I think we can all point

49:56

to specific examples in our own life where

49:58

here's something we like that it's very very

50:00

tight and neat and minimalists. Maybe it's even

50:02

like a musical argument. Yeah, I love

50:05

like minimalist ambient recordings,

50:08

but I'm also the type of person who enjoys

50:10

uh cacophonist recordings and complex

50:13

recordings, and likewise with visual

50:15

arts, likewise with you know, film,

50:18

TV and other mediums you you

50:20

like hugely layered like mixed tracks

50:22

and stuff. Yeah. Yeah, but then

50:24

I also like, uh, you know, I

50:27

love I don't know, I don't, I don't know that it gets

50:29

kind of complicated, right, because even something that is

50:31

very minimalist can be of course very complicated

50:34

and layered. Uh. But

50:36

but yeah, I think everybody is gonna everybody's

50:39

taste pendulum is going to swing both ways there.

50:41

But that's the world of art though, right, I mean,

50:43

so that's one thing. That's the world of human

50:46

creation. Um. And sometimes

50:48

those creations are are made, uh

50:51

to mimic nature, but they are not necessarily

50:53

nature itself. Right, Yes, And I think

50:55

you can apply something similar to science. So

50:57

some of what Sober is going to write in this article

51:00

mirrors what we were just talking about with Ball.

51:02

Like he he starts off by saying, Okay,

51:04

it's clear that simpler theories have

51:07

some qualities that are good. They're easier

51:09

to understand, they're easier to remember,

51:11

they're easier to test, uh,

51:13

And of course in just an aesthetic

51:16

sense, they can be more beautiful. But

51:18

he says that the real problem comes in when you're trying

51:20

to figure out how good is a theory for telling

51:22

you what's true? You know, how

51:25

well does it predict things that you will encounter

51:27

in the world. Some pasta scientific

51:30

thinkers have tried to come up with reasons

51:32

why. Yeah, it's like simplicity is

51:35

actually better. It actually predicts predicts

51:37

the world better. And a lot of these justifications were

51:39

theological in nature. Uh.

51:41

Like for example, in Newton and

51:44

talking about why he prefers simpler theories,

51:46

wrote quote to choose those constructions

51:49

which, without straining, reduced things to

51:51

the greatest simplicity. Uh. The reason

51:53

of this is that truth is ever to

51:55

be found in simplicity, and not in

51:57

the multiplicity and confusion of things.

52:00

It is the perfection of God's works that

52:02

they are all done with the greatest simplicity.

52:04

He is the God of order and not of confusion.

52:07

And therefore, as they that would understand

52:09

the frame of the world must endeavor to reduce

52:12

their knowledge to all possible simplicity.

52:14

So it must be in seeking to understand

52:17

these visions. So again, I mean, I would

52:19

say that's fine to believe that. That's not a scientific

52:21

reason for believing things that simpler

52:23

things are more likely to be true. Right, had

52:25

to fall back on the idea that we have a lawful,

52:29

good God as opposed to a chaotic good

52:31

God. Right, I mean, it would only be a bad

52:33

God that would allow more complex explanations

52:36

to be correct. And so were actually says

52:38

there are some cases today, uh

52:41

that can help us know when a model

52:43

is objectively more accurate, like modern

52:46

statistical methods, there are some ways that

52:48

you can reduce theories to mathematical

52:50

advantage, at least roughly, and

52:53

that in these cases there there are

52:55

times where you can show simpler is actually

52:58

better. Uh. He argues, there reparadigms

53:00

in which Occam's razor holds true, and

53:03

so the first one is that sometimes

53:05

simpler theories actually have higher

53:08

probabilities. He invokes

53:10

the medical adage here, don't chase

53:12

zebras. This is this comes

53:14

from the idea of you know, when you hear hoofbeats,

53:17

think horses, not zebras. I've also

53:19

heard that as unicorns. As

53:21

another analogy, if you hear footsteps coming down

53:23

the hall, you can have a couple of different hypotheses.

53:26

It's a human walking down the hall, or

53:28

it's a RoboCop walking down the hall, which

53:31

one is going to be correct more often, Well,

53:33

it's going to be a human. It could either conceivably

53:36

be somebody in a RoboCup cost

53:38

him, but the chances

53:40

of that are pretty slimp. I mean, unless you like

53:43

are in a RoboCop factory or something.

53:45

It's going to be a human way more often, And the

53:47

same goes in diagnosing diseases. If you

53:49

observe a set of symptoms in

53:52

patient history that are equally likely

53:54

to predict a common disease and a rare

53:56

disease, pick the common one, you're

53:58

going to be correct more often than

54:01

if you always pick the rare one. Right.

54:03

Um. You know this also brings me back to the serial killer

54:06

example. You know, like, what what is

54:08

more more likely though that it's someone

54:10

that the individual new, or it is a random

54:12

killing by a serial murder. You know, unless

54:14

there is a serial murder active in the area, which

54:17

raises that that the chances

54:19

for that to be true, but by a considerable margin.

54:22

Uh, it's going to remain a zebra. Now

54:24

a unicorn, but a zebra exactly unless

54:26

you have independent evidence pointing

54:28

to that as a superior hypothesis. There's

54:30

no reason to go to a rare

54:33

phenomenon that would explain things equally.

54:35

Well, yeah, so I know it seems like there are enough

54:37

podcasts about serial murders. It might

54:39

seem like there are more of them out there

54:41

than there are. Well, there you get into some cognitive

54:44

biases from Yeah, the availability

54:46

heuristic kicks in But

54:48

of course, another question is, like, how often

54:51

does a thorough review actually put

54:53

you in the situation where two things explain

54:55

what you see equally well, like truly

54:57

equally well. One's rare and one's comm

55:01

But but so Sober says that

55:03

you've got this concept he calls the razor of

55:05

silence, and and the basic

55:07

explanation of this is that if you've got

55:10

evidence that A is the cause of

55:12

something and no evidence that

55:14

B is the cause of something, then

55:16

A alone is statistically

55:18

a better explanation than A and

55:21

B together. This goes back to the stacking

55:23

of explanations that we were talking about earlier,

55:25

Like, if you've got an explanation that already

55:27

explains everything, there is

55:30

no justification for adding additional

55:32

explanations on top of it. That you

55:34

don't need to add the angels pushing the planets

55:37

right, Well, let's come back to the murder scenario. How

55:39

do we apply this forensically? Uh?

55:41

Well, as so we're actually I think says something

55:43

kind of like this, But like, if you have clear

55:46

evidence of one cause of death on somebody,

55:49

you don't need to assume extra causes

55:51

of death stacking on top of it without

55:54

direct evidence of them as well. So if you

55:56

find like a you know, a body, I

55:59

don't know, a body the bottom of a cliff and

56:01

they're dead, you can assume that it was falling

56:03

off the cliff that killed them. You don't need to also

56:05

assume that they were poisoned or

56:08

something. King unless you know, you do blood talks

56:10

and then it comes back with poison. You can't

56:12

assume it then. But there's no reason to

56:14

start stacking on additional assumptions.

56:17

Now there's another way that sober says

56:20

sometimes OCAM's razer actually does

56:22

hold true. It it's sometimes simpler

56:24

explanations are better, and it's simply

56:26

that sometimes simpler theories are better supported

56:29

by observations. Uh. He

56:31

gives this great example. Suppose all the lights

56:33

on your street go out. You could have two

56:35

competing hypotheses. First

56:38

one something happened at the power plant

56:40

and that influenced what happened to all the

56:42

lights in the neighborhood, or maybe there's a down

56:45

power line something like that. The

56:47

other one, something happened to all

56:49

of the light bulbs at the same time.

56:52

Now, these would both explain the observations,

56:55

right, Like either either

56:57

all of the light bulbs suddenly went out

57:00

on their own independently, just coincidentally,

57:02

all at the same time, or there's something happened

57:04

with the power supply to the whole neighborhood.

57:07

Sober argues, based on the work of the philosopher

57:09

Hans Reichenbach, that in this

57:11

case you can actually show mathematically

57:14

that the evidence for the first for

57:16

the power plant hypothesis is stronger,

57:18

just based on the fact that it's simpler.

57:21

Uh. And a similar example in real

57:23

science look at common descent in biology.

57:26

So based on the evidence of massive

57:28

amounts of genetic code shared by

57:31

all living things today, people

57:33

usually say, okay, that that's evidence

57:35

of common descent. We all share a common

57:37

ancestor, we all inherit some common

57:40

genetic code. Now you could also

57:42

say, well, maybe all living things on Earth

57:44

have different ancestors and they just happened

57:46

by coincidence to have overlapping

57:49

strings of genetic code. That

57:51

would require a lot of strange coincidences.

57:54

So the evidence actually favors common

57:56

descent, just like it favors a power outage

57:58

over hundreds of simultaneous light bulb

58:00

failures. So a serial

58:02

killer example of this might be, oh man,

58:06

what's happening in the dark corners of your brain

58:08

today, Rob, I don't know, I just keep coming back to it, I guess.

58:10

But okay, so one person.

58:12

So if like people, they're all these dead people

58:14

and they all have say a death head,

58:16

moth um, what was a caterpillar?

58:19

Oh? Yes, yes, yes, yes? Or was it a cocoon?

58:22

I can't recall off hand and from silence

58:24

to the lamps. Yeah, they've got like a moth cocoon in

58:27

their mouth or something. So perhaps they

58:29

just happened to each individually wind

58:31

up with one in their mouth, like somebody accidentally eight

58:34

one one in the salad bar. Another one was

58:36

like looking up and it fell out of a tree, because one

58:38

had escaped from a private collection, was living in a tree.

58:41

You could have sort of independent explanations

58:44

for why each of these occurred. Or the other possibility

58:46

is somebody's killing them and putting them in their throats.

58:48

Right, the one common explanation actually explains

58:51

observations better than assuming a

58:53

whole bunch of strange coincidence. Yes, and

58:55

then we got the third paradigm Sober gets

58:57

into, which is that he says, sometimes the

58:59

simplicity of a model is relevant to

59:01

estimating its predictive accuracy.

59:04

So what a good theories do well? They make

59:06

accurate predictions about things we don't know

59:08

yet. They either accurately predict future measurements

59:10

or outcomes or discoveries. Does

59:13

acams Raiser have anything to say here? Sober

59:15

says yes, Sometimes simplicity

59:17

affects our best guesses about

59:20

how accurate a new theory will be,

59:22

and he cites the work of a Japanese statistician

59:25

named Hiratuga Akayiki, who

59:27

did important work in a field called model

59:30

selection theory. This means how to judge

59:32

the strength of a new model or theory before

59:34

it has had time to be tested in the field,

59:37

and a model evaluation system

59:39

called the Akayiki information

59:42

criterion says that you can predict how

59:44

good a new model or theory will be by two

59:46

measures, how well it fits old

59:48

or existing data. Obviously, better fits

59:50

are better, and then how simple it is

59:53

Simpler models are better. Uh. Simplicity

59:55

is evaluated by quote the number of adjustable

59:58

parameters and having few or is better.

1:00:01

Now. Sober gives an analysis of why

1:00:03

this is the case, using an example of trying

1:00:05

to estimate the height of plants in a corn

1:00:07

field based on previous random samplings

1:00:10

of the fields. I'm not going to get down into

1:00:12

all the details of this, but if you want a deeper understanding

1:00:14

of this one, i'd recommend looking up the article

1:00:17

that. The short version is that in some situations,

1:00:20

depending on a number of assumptions about what types

1:00:22

of models and data you're dealing with, simplicity

1:00:24

of a model is actually a good predictor of

1:00:27

how well future data will conform to

1:00:29

that model. And it's just a fact about

1:00:31

statistics. The sorcery of average

1:00:33

is not a fact about individual cases

1:00:35

on the ground. Now, he concludes

1:00:37

by saying that these three paradigms have something

1:00:40

uh in common and quote whether

1:00:42

a given problem fits into any of them

1:00:44

depends on empirical assumptions about

1:00:47

the problem. Those assumptions

1:00:49

might be true of some problems but false of

1:00:51

others. Although parsimony is

1:00:53

demonstrably relevant in forming judgments

1:00:56

about what the world is like, there is,

1:00:58

in the end no un conditional

1:01:00

and presupposition less justification

1:01:03

for Ockham's razor. Uh

1:01:05

So that's tough, right, Like Ockham's razor

1:01:08

is not a tool you can apply to every

1:01:10

situation to get closer to the truth. It's

1:01:12

a tool that is useful sometimes

1:01:15

for some types of judgment,

1:01:18

and the real difficulty is recognizing when

1:01:20

you're in one of those situations

1:01:22

in which it's useful or one of those

1:01:24

situations where it's actually just a logical

1:01:27

red herring. So really it

1:01:29

kind of comes back to, uh, you know, we we

1:01:31

were talking about Sagan at the beginning of this and how he

1:01:33

said, this is one of the tools in your

1:01:35

skeptics tool chest. And

1:01:37

the thing about a tool chest is that you have more

1:01:39

than one tool in there. And the screwdriver

1:01:42

cannot be used for everything, right, I

1:01:44

mean, you can try. It's useful for a lot of things, uh,

1:01:47

and certainly very useful for screws, but there's gonna

1:01:49

be a time when you're

1:01:51

gonna have to pull out another tool to deal

1:01:53

with the problem. And there are gonna be plenty of cases

1:01:55

you will encounter We're trying to use the skeptical

1:01:58

tool of Akham's razor is like trying to clean

1:02:00

out your electrical socket with the screwdriver. You're

1:02:03

just it's gonna steer you astray. And I'm

1:02:05

very sorry that in the end here we don't have

1:02:07

like a clean rule to just guide

1:02:10

you like this is when you can use it, this is when

1:02:12

you can't. I think it comes down to,

1:02:14

I mean, Sober has some useful

1:02:16

things to say. They're about like types of situations

1:02:18

where it is helpful. But yeah,

1:02:21

there there, there's I'm sorry, there's not just

1:02:23

like an easy rule of thumb for when they when

1:02:25

the razor will be helpful. Yeah. I mean, ultimately,

1:02:27

it is a tool that was not plucked

1:02:30

out of the sky, but it was plucked out of

1:02:32

human reasoning and uh and and

1:02:34

human problem solving. By the

1:02:36

way, coming back to the name of the Rose,

1:02:39

I want to point out that there is apparently

1:02:41

a highly regarded Spanish

1:02:44

seven eight bit computer game based

1:02:47

on the name of the road. Yeah,

1:02:49

it's a it's titled The Abbey of the Crime,

1:02:52

which was actually uh and they

1:02:54

conceived it as an adaptation of the name of

1:02:56

the Rose, but they were unable to secure permission

1:02:58

to do so. And uh they

1:03:00

in fact, I read that they didn't even hear back from

1:03:02

Echo. They tried to get a hut of them and they couldn't

1:03:04

get hold of it. And try to imagine the umberto

1:03:06

Echo essay about this video game when

1:03:09

he tries to play it, that

1:03:11

would be good. Um, but basically

1:03:14

the Abbey of the Crime. The title they went with

1:03:16

was apparently like the working title for

1:03:19

the Name of the Rose at one point. Um,

1:03:21

so they released it under that name, and instead of

1:03:24

having the main character be William of Baskerville,

1:03:26

the main character is William of Alcolm

1:03:29

and uh. And I thought that was pretty much

1:03:31

the into it. You know, you can look up the footage

1:03:33

of the game and all. But then I just learned

1:03:36

for the first time this may be more common

1:03:38

knowledge for everyone else out there. Um, there

1:03:41

is a remake of it like they did, like a revamped

1:03:44

version of it with improved but nicely pixelated

1:03:46

graphics. Um, the Abbey

1:03:48

of the Crime Extensive, which

1:03:51

you can get on Steam. Apparently. I don't really

1:03:53

do Steam, so I don't really know how it works. But um

1:03:56

yeah, it's listed on there. Came out

1:03:59

and it looks really cool, like the For

1:04:01

instance, now the the updated sprites the little

1:04:03

characters in the game, they look

1:04:05

so much like the actors

1:04:08

in the original film adaptation

1:04:10

to the Name of Rose, Like it's a little Sean Connery

1:04:12

and Christians Later. Yeah, I don't

1:04:14

know if they got permission to use their likenesses. Um,

1:04:17

how close. Does they have to be in eight bits?

1:04:19

I don't know. That's that's a great question.

1:04:21

But but my other question

1:04:24

is just I would like to ask listeners out there have if

1:04:26

you've played this, please let

1:04:28

me know how it is. I'm very curious, Not that

1:04:30

I think I will actually play it for myself, but

1:04:32

I just I'm genuinely, genuinely

1:04:35

interested in, uh in what a video

1:04:37

game adaptation to the Name of the Rose is. Like.

1:04:39

If you know the solution at the end of the book, can you

1:04:41

automatically beat the game immediately? Like

1:04:44

yeah? Or are there different solutions?

1:04:46

I don't know, Uh, you know, is it a

1:04:48

different murder each time? That would be crazy? Arrives

1:04:50

at the abbey, speaks to the abbot immediately

1:04:53

says I got something to lay on you. Is

1:04:56

Acam's razor a an item

1:04:58

that you can pick up like a plus one

1:05:00

occoms razor that can then be employed in combat.

1:05:03

It's like the Master Sword. Yeah, surely

1:05:05

there is not combat in this game. I

1:05:07

should hope not. I should hope it's just a lot of

1:05:09

talking um Catholics.

1:05:13

Yeah, I cast

1:05:16

the poverty of Christ on you. Well.

1:05:18

In the screenshot I was looking at, does look like the

1:05:21

main character Baskerville slash. ACoM

1:05:23

does have a pair of spectacles, but then there's

1:05:25

like one to three there. There

1:05:28

are multiple empty spots here,

1:05:30

So I guess he gets other stuff. I mean, I

1:05:32

guess various books and whatnot, some

1:05:34

of lemon juice. Uh, and probably

1:05:36

some cheese, some cheese where

1:05:39

that gets like some fried cheese at some point,

1:05:41

yeah, I think so, but mostly books, mostly

1:05:43

books. All right, So there

1:05:45

you have it, Acoms raisor hopefully we're able to

1:05:47

to lay it out for you, um,

1:05:49

you know, an explanation of what what

1:05:52

alcomes razor is, where it came from, uh,

1:05:54

some of the various opinions on its

1:05:56

usefulness. You know. It's

1:05:59

so you can take the tool, put it back into the

1:06:01

tool chest, and know a little little bit more about

1:06:03

it the next time you pull it out and

1:06:05

go to use it. In the meantime, if you want

1:06:07

to check out other episodes of Stuff to Blow your Mind,

1:06:10

go to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That will

1:06:12

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1:06:14

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1:06:16

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1:06:19

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1:06:21

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1:06:23

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1:06:25

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1:06:27

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1:06:29

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1:06:32

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1:06:34

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1:06:36

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