On the Beauty of Occam's Razor

Ah, Occam's razor. The nifty little principle that trims every rational discussion of stupid pseudoscientific conspiracy theories and alternative views. The underrated idea that we should, among all the complete explanations for a phenomenon, choose the simplest one, is so effective against both superstitions and Illuminati, that the sight of it slicing mercilessly through the believer's arguments makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside.

What IS Ockam's razor? It is the statement that entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem, or, in English, entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity, according to Wikipedia. Effectively, this principle states that if we have several different theories that explain something (and they all include all the facts), we should consider the simplest of them to be true. Lovely.

Recently, a gullible friend of mine, whose name I will not share, started discussing conspiracy theories with me. The wide Internet offers plenty of material for all sorts of things, and he had started taking seriously movies like "Zeitgeist" or "The World is Ruled by 4-Dimensional Lizard-Men" (or something). He was convinced that Illuminati are on their way to establish world domination and that swine flu was part of their evil scheme. I, myself, do not take such things seriously, so I argued with him about the validity of such theories. Thankfully, he is not religious, nor is he so close-minded that my arguments can't come through, so several times in our discussions, I saw Ockham's razor come in really handy and I was delighted. We also argued about economics, but that was normal .

For example, he attributes the Financial Crisis to an Illuminati plot. He said that the crisis and the negative effects it has on society are actually the sophisticated plans of that secret group unraveling before our very eyes. They were deliberately driving the US economy towards that.
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This is his explanation.
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My response explanation is that the crisis is caused by G. W. Bush's negligence and lack of care about the future of the US economy, combined with the normal processes in the stock market, the housing bubble, lending, and so on.
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Both explanations are logical (I will not go into details, because it would be too boring). However, his is more complicated than mine. Mine takes into account only things that one can see in the news, whereas his includes secret societies and plans for world domination. Mine is the simpler, and therefore the principle called Occam's razor postulates that he is wrong. In a strange coincidence, mine also makes more sense.

Another example would be me sitting in front of the PC. All of a sudden, I hear an object falling in the kitchen. My explanation would be that the cat pushed it; or it was placed clumsily in the first place and it just finished slipping off; or that it was, say, supported by a cube of ice that finally melted away and the object met its doom.
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He, however, believed in the existence of 4D creatures. He had sent me a YouTube video prevuously that explained how dimensions work. The video showed taking a 2D creature, represented by a small paper square, "living" in its 2D world, represented by a table, into the 3rd dimension, i.e. the air above the table. Obviously, the 2D guy was still existing when the narrator picked him up, but the other 2D folk could not see him, because their world is limited to the flat surface of the table. My friend argued that, since in a similar manner a 4D creature could hide from 3D creatures, there could be a 4D creature very close to me without me being able to see it. Just like the 2D square guy was a few milimeters above the other square/triangle/circle "people" on the table. Such a 4D creature could have sneaked in the kitchen, unheard because of the wind, and could have dropped the object on purpose. I agree - it could.
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However, it didn't.
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We both observed the phenomenon of an object in another room falling. My explanations are simpler than his, not only because his takes a longer paragraph to describe. Therefore, I should let Occam's razor cut his theory off my tangle of thoughts how this could have happened and accept that it was some pet or placement problem. Surprisingly, it makes the most sense.

This is what I love about Occam's razor - it removes the absurd theories, leaving only the simplest explanations. It elegantly eliminates all pseudoscientific, superstitious or conspirative hypotheses, leaving after it only clean, hard science. I do not consider myself gullible and I am often vexed by UFO stories and UFO-explanations. Consequentially, I adore the way Occam's razor deals with them.

Consider the Naska ground images. Enormous figures of animals and people visible clearly only through the bird's eye. They were marked in the fields a long time ago - long before man actually developed any sort of flying machine, so obviously the Naska people could not observe their creation. Ergo, the presence of the pictures is explained by aliens doing it with UFO's.
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However, there is another explanation. The figures are meant to represent alleys in which Naskans would walk as a part of their religious ceremonies.
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The UFO explanation demands a scientifically advanced alien race. The ritual explanation simply uses something present in all peoples on the Naskans' civilizational level - a process of religious worship. Which is simpler? The religious worship theory. Boom - it also makes more sense! True, it is more fun to believe that UFO's exist and that aliens have ordered the Aztecs and the Egyptians to construct Huitzilopotchtli or Cheops' pyramid, but there is a simpler explanation - people's beliefs (religious in this case) and it's Occam-compatible. This example I am copying by memory from a National Geographic Channel documentary.

I know of no proven conspiracy theory, and yet they have kept coming for at least a century (remember "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion). Conspiracy theories are one wild guess after another. What does Occam's razor do with guesses that are too wild? That's right - if you allow me yet another metaphor - it cuts them away. It dismisses them as false, and so far I have never seen it fail.

It is amazing how it also tackles ghost theories. You felt pressure on your legs last night because a poltergeist sat on them? Oh, no, you should see a doctor, because it is far more probable that there's something wrong with your neurons. This here old photo has the blurry image of a pale woman next to my grand-aunt Merry! It's a ghost! Nope, it it is simply the poor photographer having reused an older photo in order to take a second shot on it. They did that back in the days and previous images sometimes refused to go away. I'm sorry, but Occam's razor says it's not a ghost.

However, is not Ockam's razor fake sometimes?
When could it, Billy? I ask.
B: Like when we argue about how animals came to be. It is much easier to assume that God created everything.
S: I'm sorry, Billy, but that's called creationism and it's not real science. Real science explains things. It tells us how it all happened and it has an explanation for much of what happened through time.
B: Well, "God created it" is an explanation, too.
S: No, it isn't. Let me ask you this, How did he create everything? Which force of physics did he create first? Which force of physics did he use to merge the cells of the jellyfish/cat/worm?
B: Um, I don't know. It's some divine thing.
S: I'm sorry, Billy, but you need an explanation if you want it to be science. If you can't explain how God did it, you need to accept Evolution. In this case Occam's razor is not broken - William of Occam made an important note back in the days, that we should choose the simplest theory only among the theories that explain everything. We have two theories here, the Biblical one and the Darwinist one. The Biblical one is powerless to explain HOW God created all, but the theory of Evolution can (through a continuous natural selection process) and therefore, by another rule, this time purely scientific, we accept Charles Darwin's explanation. So this misconception is scientific.

Also, the friend I talked about at the beginning of this entry called Occam's razor "escapist." Is it really? True, it does mean that one refuses much of what charlatans and other people with weird hypotheses throw forward. However, remember the special rule of using Occam's razor - that we can only choose among the theories that fit ALL facts into the explanation. It is wrong to choose an explanation that ignores even the slightest detail about a phenomenon. If there were a rusty old billboard lying broken near the road, with bits of car paint and broken glass from headlamps we could assume that
1) The billboard has fallen under its own weight, weakened by the rust;
2)A car hit it and got away;
3)A car crashed into it because the driver intended to destroy the billboard since s/he is a 4D shape-shifting reptilian that hates billboards.
Theory #3 is more complicated than either #1 or #2, so we dismiss it, in accordance with Occam's razor. It is easier to conclude that the pole broke down because it was rusty than to include a car in the explanation. However, according to Occam's razor, that, too, is incorrect: we are ignoring the presence of car paint and broken glass that lie on the ground. They cannot have come out of nowhere, and only #2 is simple enough but also including all the details. Therefore, the correct assumption is that a car broke it. If this principle was, indeed, escapist, then I would explain the billboard's collapse with rust and weight. However, Occam's razor is NOT escapist and I must include all details in the explanation in order to use the razor.

In fact, Occam's razor is an excellent thing to use when figuring out stuff. People do it subconsciously all the time, each time we dismiss possibilities that are too weird. It plays an important role in Umberto Eco's book "The Name of the Rose" as well as detective stories. In the latter, it is hidden, but you can spot the author secretly using it each time when the private eye protagonist does not say something like "This rich old guy was killed in his sleep by zombie aliens who sneaked past his young wife and teleported the wrong kind of pills in his stomach." The author knows that it's more plausible for the woman to have poisoned him deliberately, instead of aliens having done that. The genre is saved.

Finally, and most importantly, Occam's razor deals with some pesky forms of pseudoscience. Think about the similarity between the snail's shell, the hurricane, and romanesco broccoli. They all exhibit a logarithmic spiral in their shape. Wow, how does it come to this?
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One explanation is that Aliens intelligently designed these things so that they have a logarithmic spiral embedded in their structure.
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Another explanation is that the logarithmic spiral is just a shape of spiral in this world of ours and that things like snails, broccoli, or hurricanes start up in the shape of a random spiral, but eventually all come down to looking like a logarithmic spiral.

As you may guess, the easier explanation is the second. Both work, but the second one is simpler. as a result, Occam's razor cuts out the first one and, as rational people, we accept the second explanation of how the logarithmic spiral went there.

And that's basically how it works. Perfectly clear and always helpful, Occam's razor is a powerful tool against all sorts of absurd hypotheses about extraterrestrials or freemasons, about miracles or some pseudoscience, or simply put, against nonsense.

VALE