Occam’s Razor Burn
PREFATORY NOTE: This post was half written by Sunday evening (yesterday) and has suddenly become more directly relevant [correcting previous AutoCorrect goof] with Monday morning’s display of panic by the mass media, Wall Street, academic economists, and UniParty politicians, including a notable chunk of Republican Senators. Their response to the Trump Tariff Ultimatum is classic Occam’s Razor stuff, basically saying, “Look at the Stock Market! It’s obvious that this is a calamitously wrong policy.” A response achieved by jumping right to an answer with no resort to logic, mathematical proofs, or anything more rational than headline hysteria. What this post is about and why you should read it, though tariffs probably won’t be mentioned again here.
William of Ockham (1285-1347, AD)
Let’s start with a paradox. This is Part 3 of a series in which the first two parts didn’t know they were just parts. We’ll see that connection shortly, but we’ll begin the Occam Way, with iconic simplicity. What is Occam’s Razor? We see it invoked all the time, in all manner of subjects, and it’s dropped into argumentation like some sort of final word on the subject. But what is it?
I apologize for all the fancy talk up front here. This post is about cutting the throat of Occam’s Razor. Why I felt it necessary to show that I have done some research here, which is more than most of the people who cite it as some kind of authority can do. Occam’s Razor is not an axiom but is treated like one. Unlike the Peter Principle, it’s not used to start conversations but to end them. Here’s the tie-in to Part 1 and Part 2 of this discussion, namely the two IPR posts immediately preceding this one:
I call them “The Grinners.” Men who made whole careers out of dismissing
provocative ideas by sneering at them. My point of departure was Penn
Jillette. He’s just a vivid example people know about.
The ultimate reductionist practitioners of Occam’s Razor. My point of departure, also
based on the “obvious”, is the monstrosity of countering logical opposition by destroying
that opposition personally, thereby proving them wrong because “Look who said it…”
Yes, the posts I’m referencing as Parts 1 and 2 of this one were satirical and contained no hard “evidence” of what I’m claiming here. By way of explanation, I’m going to commit another supposed “no-no,” mainly analyzing what humor is and how it works. Humor is the unexpected and sometimes contradictory juxtaposition of a familiar thing viewed in a different context. A pompous dowager proceeding toward her place at the center of attention when, suddenly, she slips on a banana peel and falls on her ass. We laugh. The laugh is recognition that she’s human, fallible, and no better than us. It’s an easy example because we’ve seen the joke many times before. Because it’s still funny. We see the dowager and are already looking for the banana peel. Because we know what she doesn’t. She’s not a queen but the butt of a joke. Latest variation I’ve seen: an insurance company ad shows us the banana peel, then the warehouse employee blinded by the pile of boxes in his arms walking straight toward the banana peel while another employee (us!) watches, followed by the inevitable catastrophic crash of boxes all over the floor… Last shot? The banana peel untouched behind the mass of broken things that fell quite independently because “shit happens” and that’s what insurance companies protect you from.
The last-second switcheroo is what standup comedians make their living on. How do they do it? Why can’t most other people do it, except occasionally and by accident? It’s a right-brain/left-brain thing. The sense of humor — this is important — is a right brain function. It has to do with feelings, sensations, emotional touchstones, and vivid personal experiences. The left brain is the analytical side of the mind. It gathers data, measures, quantifies, counts, performs standard routines of logic, and provides “answers” to questions asked by an inquiring conscious mind. Most people are either right- or left-brain dominant. Think math and science on the left, and the humanities and arts on the right. There is actually a physical channel in the brain connecting the two sides (it’s called the corpus callosum), and communication between the two halves occurs regularly. The professional comedian, as well as humorists and satirists, are neither right- nor left-brain dominant but comfortably balanced between the two, which is widely described as a limitation by the observers from both the right and left. [punchline there…]
The comedian has a sense of humor continuously active in his right brain. He finds lots of things funny. But his left brain is equally active and curious as hell. He continuously collects data from different perspectives on his own vivid personal experience. He needs to know why things strike him as funny. He is searching for things that don’t belong together but somehow do belong together in ways that are, uh, funny.
The origin of jokes can be on either the right or the left side. Two quick examples. George Carlin’s routine about “stuff” is something only a world-class standup could produce. He gets to thinking (remembering, chuckling) about how when you go somewhere, you always take some of your stuff with you, leaving most of it at home obviously. Then, when you’re where you’re visiting, you have to take a side trip somewhere else, and now must bring some of the subset of stuff on this trip with you… again obviously. Now your stuff is strung out across multiple locations and you are simply the means by which bits of your stuff are experiencing new adventures. You live it with him. Funny. Look it up at YT. Now for the left brain as point of origin. Evelyn Waugh invents an aristocratic grand dame named Lady Circumference. He selects it rationally because he knows there has to be some funny in there somewhere. He proceeds to write the main plot line of his novel, and we learn in passing, in a subordinate clause, that aleady Circumference has a son named Lord Tangent. Subsequently, we learn that Tangent has had a bizarre accident, getting grazed by a projectile from a live starter’s gun. Back to the main plot, which rips along as usual until we learn, again in a subordinate clause, that Lady Circumference has been delayed by the funeral of her son, who died of blood poisoning. There is no further mention of Lord Tangent in the book. If you don’t see the funny in this, I refer you to a higher authority:
What does any of this have to do with Occam’s Razor? Plenty. The razor is a tool used to dismiss what the observer perceived to be obviously wrong or ridiculous or to confirm what seems obviously true to the people who know things like science, math, and logic. But there is nothing scientific, mathematical, or logical about making a decision based on the fact that it’s the easiest available answer. That’s the unintended irony of Occam. It is most commonly cited by those who are strongly left brain in perspective and therefore have no sense of humor to speak of, especially the capacity to perceive irony.
Strongly left brain? The scourge of our era. There is strong evidence (look it up) that those with left-wing political and social views are unhappier, more disappointed with life than conservatives. If we look closely at the 20th through the 21st Centuries to date, we can see that in cultural terms the left brain has come to dominate academia, the media, and by osmosis the political status quo. Religious faith, literature, music, the fine arts, individual creativity, family focus, and esthetic and gustatory connoisseurs are right brain avocations. Atheism, the newest philosophy on the block, had made extraordinary increases in acceptance and popularity at the direct expense of religion, literature, the arts, career choices, and family-based values.
It’s impossible to understate the contribution of atheism to our current set of cultural circumstances. Even Darwin was skeptical of his theory of evolution. He was on record saying that if the fossil record did not uncover abundant examples of transition species, his theory would be disproven. But none one was really keeping track of that heuristic, and by the time the weight of the non-evidence of transition fossils and something called “The Cambrian Explosion” hit the academic world Darwin’s theory had already been institutionalized beyond recovery. By then the heavy hitters in official science chose not to meet scientific opposition by synthesizing a workable explanatory model for the discrepancies but with the sneers and smirks that had been used against Galileo in the Middle Ages and more successfully quite recently against Immanuel Velikovsky. When DNA up-ended the random mutation story proposed by Darwin to the extent that one of its Nobel-winning discoverers declared that life as we know it did not originate on earth but arrived here from elsewhere, the response was even more disastrous. Science declared that the origin of life was not its mission or its responsibility to discover.
This served, in effect if not intent, to amputate the possibility of an intelligent creator from the “circumstances” regarded as evidence by official science. Then the entire academic and intellectual entropy embarked on a long-term experiment in scientists’ favorite process, Entropy. Things fall apart. There is still no science of Syntropy, however, even though things do come together and grow amazingly more complicated through time. What did Cultural Entropy bequeath us and what are we left with?
In academia, all the disciplines once called the humanities are in rapid decline, replaced by students who have been induced to become members of rational professions like law, business, medicine, computer science, and tenured professors in quasi-scientific humanities like economics, political science, social science, and specialized niche chairs based on ethnicity, gender, and ever narrower slices of what used to be grand studies of philosophy, history, and art.
What has this meant in real world terms? Explosive increases in the number of lawyers, soft rather than hard science professionals, and an extraordinarily unnnoticed death spiral in the publication of great fiction, plays, classical music, mathematics, physics, cosmology, and groundbreaking philosophers. Innovation prospers only in siloes of specialty because the “consensus” is that the big questions about the universe and its origins and possible meaning have been decided by Darwin, DNA, the Hubble telescope, and the proliferating data spewed out by computers headed at breakneck speed toward “The Singularity.”
The most serious impact of these changes has been the rising influence on practically everything of lawyers. A profession which was once rooted in the concepts of Justice and the personal ethics of striving for justice in human courts not to be confused with divine justice, has devolved into a highly compensated trade (as opposed to profession) where the goal is not justice but winning the argument. It has rules that are the fossilized remains of the old ethical standards, but rules are not standards. They are obstacles to be pushed, bent, twisted, or when the stakes are high enough run over, around, under, or through.
Left vs. right brain reminder. Left is best at analysis. Right is best at synthesis. Analysis is a process of taking things apart. Synthesis is a process of putting things together. The legal profession claims it does both these things. It no longer does. The prosecutor/plaintiff aims to tear the defendant’s argument to pieces. The defense attorneys aim to tear the case made by the prosecutor/plaintiff apart. The target audience of both sides is to push the jury toward what they perceive as the easiest answer, guilty or not guilty. Occam in black robes. One could say this has always been so, but this would be wrong on two levels.
The rise of science and the decline of faith that the ideal of divine justice should always be a constraint on the behaviors of everyone involved, from lawyers to judges to juries have changed the circumstances of trial law in ways no one cares to look at. It is common now for prosecutors to decline indictments based on what they deem “circumstantial” cases, meaning there is insufficient forensic science evidence to win at trial. Why are circumstantial cases hard to win? Because law school trains lawyers to disdain the big picture in favor of the telling physical details a juror cannot refute: DNA, fingerprints, ballistics, GPS data, CCTV clips, travel receipts, and computer-based records of various kinds. This has created a profession-wide bias against any evidence which can be described as circumstantial, including confessions to the police and other investigators. All eyewitness testimony is not only suspect; it is a meticulously documented high-error confusion factor. Jurors must be expressly warned against it. Lawyers are afraid of it because it is expressly circumstantial and therefore a liability in the eyes of both judge and jury, who always have the closing remarks of a lawyer shouting “circumstantial” in their ears as they make their decisions.
The way to see how powerful an impact this has had is to recognize that venerable standard “reasonable doubt” has been redefined through practice as the far from reasonable “shadow of a doubt.” Guilty beyond a reasonable doubt is not an easy answer to reach. Almost all circumstantial cases hinge on the reasonable doubt threshold, because, no, they never found the murder weapon, the cop might have slurred one of the Miranda warnings, we still don’t know if the wife of the deceased had a lover on the side, and the experts were suspiciously divided about that bite mark on the dead woman’s breast… Let’s face it. The lawyerly distrust of eyewitnesses is the same distrust they have of jurors, who must now have all the key variables absolutely nailed down before they can be exposed to the evidence in a courtroom. Never mind thst before the TV shows CSI and Forensic Files, jurors delivered guilty verdicts in heavily circumstantial cases for many years. Everyone involved once trusted the lurking ideal of divine Justice to guide jurors in setting aside their prejudices and differences to gauge testimony critically, fairly, and based on the intuitions of personal judgment and conscience.
How many potentially brilliant and creative minds we have destroyed in the law schools of America can never be known. They are virtually untrained p, and actually hostile to, the skills involved in mounting a circumstantial (i.e., Big Picture) care for or against anything. (I don’t lose arguments with lawyers; this why. They argue without actually thinking. They’re just looking for one point of error or ambiguity to focus on like a microscope. When they punch themselves out, they are powerless to answer a question that requires them to synthesis an argument comprising the whole they claim to advocate. When you’ve tongue-tied a lawyer or reduced him to obscenities, you’ve won.)
The damages associated with a generation of brain-damaged lawyers are not confined to the courtroom. They’ve got their fingers, and their Occam drive for the easy answer, in a lot of pies nowadays. Another word for Occam is “shortcut.” It’s in all the professions, all the big questions of the day. Its near universal “tell” is the grin, the sneer, the superior attitude that conveys certainty without resort to logic, indisputable facts, or comprehensively evaluated historical data. It makes abundant use of the legal tricks we have all observed on TV shows and real court cases and published Op-Eds and legal briefs. Bigfoot doesn’t exist because there’s no dead body, and all eyewitness testimony is junk, all videos faked, all footprints hoaxed. Same with ghosts and UFOs and secret CIA assassins gunning for Presidents, Climate change is real and caused by carbon because a consensus of scientists and computer models say it is: Look at all these signatures and that hockey-stick graph! Vaccines are not dangerous, because you didn’t die of COVID, did you? Biden is completely fit and in-charge because it’s just not possible to be a senile President without anyone knowing it; the simple truth is that such accusations are Republican propaganda. Democracy is what we say it is and have always defended, and it’s only a coincidence that we ran a a presidential candidate no member of the public voted to nominate, and even you can see how easy it is to have something like that happen, because, you know, shit happens, you know that. And besides, Trump is unfit to be President because he’s vulgar, writes mean tweets, and look at all those indictments: he has to be guilty of some of them, if not all, because did I mention vulgar? and look at him trying to fire all the government employees who work their whole careers to give you all the benefits they give you. He has to be stopped. That’s a no-brainer.
You think monumental stupidities can’t occur routinely because highly educated people propose and believe in them, against the better judgment afforded by common sense. I can cite one over which I have lost a couple of valued friends, and which you will probably accept because the degree of stupidity involved was sufficient to make Occam’s Razor an appropriate countermeasure for once.
I’m referring to the 911 Conspiracy gang, constituted of dozens of engineers from multiple disciplines who proposed that the Twin Towers were not leveled by a pair of commercial airliners but by an elaborate plot to implode them with strategically placed explosives. In this case the plotting and planning required to achieve the end result was even more elaborate and required far more conspirators than the actual event did. Why Occam applied. But Occam doesn’t explain how this happened.
It happened the same way lawyers eliminated the circumstantial perspective and devoted themselves strictly to tearing down the opponent’s argument. The starting point of the engineering cabal that reindented the Twin Towers attack as a Republican conspiracy of some kind was that the Twin Towers did collapse on September 11, 2001. All the evidentiary narrative provided by the administration and media reporting was preemptively discarded. It had to be wrong because there are dozens if not hundreds of physical details we cannot presently understand. The quest to find a plausible alternative way the Towers might collapsed required thousands of man-hours by specialists in many disciplines. There was no one responsible (or qualified) for the task of comparing their own theories to the original circumstantial and historical narrative. The physical requirements for their theory could sorta kinda be met if you looked it in just their way, but they were engineers not crime investigators and they had zero understanding of all the things outside the immediate geography of the Towers that would have to have been planned, organized, staffed, and maintained in rigid silence for their theory to be correct.
It took one issue of Popular Mechanics to smack their theory to pieces with Occam horeselaughs. But there are still people who believe they were right.
This is the chief symptom of what I would characterize as a left brain disease. Having lived into my Seventies, I have experienced the phenomenon that the left brain grows stronger through time, the right brain weaker. There’s all kinds of circumstantial evidence (no studies because nobody’s looking for it) to support this hypothesis. Poetry and artistic breakthroughs are predominantly a function of youth. There is said to be a “window” of artistic masterpieces (ages 35 X 45), after which creativity seems to trail off sharply. The oldest man to have written a literary masterpiece was, by tradition, Milton, who published Paradise almost when he was 61. Other physical data support the idea that right brain capacities decline generally with age — sexual desire, the senses of taste, hearing, eyesight, etc.
In most cases, I believe, the left brain compensates by increasing its activities, becoming dominant where it was secondary, and becoming exclusive where it was merely dominant. Why we see the phenomenon of 90-year old men still relentlessly amassing financial fortunes and political power when what was once called wisdom suggests such men might turn, as previous tycoons like Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller turned at least partially away from business to philanthropy). Yes, they still want beautiful wives, but their desire for enviable possessions includes women even when sexual desire becomes a shadow of its youthful self. (Interestingly, Donald Trump’s mysterious pursuit of the Presidency in his seventies recalls Andrew Carnegie’s turned toward public service and flies in the face of the other antique money moguls we see before us: Warren Buffett, Rupert Murdoch, and George Soros, for example. Is Trump a throwback?) There was a time when this natural shift in brain orientation through time enabled aging men and women to gain a larger perspective on their personal perspectives, the evening of passions we now vaguely remember as wisdom. Just as we remember there used to be a form of entertainment called comedy. All that seems evident now is that wisdom is declining, and something unpleasant is underway among those in middle age and beyond. Most of them will survive the approach of death with varying degrees of equanimity.
Not my concern. What is my concern is the left brain dominance we see at work on the political left. The degree of that dominance seems very premature in terms of age. We don’t see how much this explains because we don’t look for it in those terms. Their left brain ailment is of the lawyerly sort. Win by attacking and always attacking in the details, the easy answers that are hard to refute in the jury room. This has been the Democrat game plan for decades now, but what is striking is how repetitive and uncreative it has become. Win by attacking the opponent personally in ways that always leave a stain, no matter how disproven or denied. When an opponent proposes a policy that does not benefit your side or accomplices, attack the opponent personally, again. Never propose a detailed synthesis of a superior alternative. Hoard statistics that can be manipulated and find the ones that can be used to frame Occam-type dismissals. Obviously wrong because THIS.
Accompanying this kind of ruthless acquisition of money and power is the left’s compensation for the loss of right brain attributes, the feelings that add color, excitement, and love in less divided minds. If you can no longer feel the beauty of a creation like the Duesenberg automobile, buy more Duesenbergs than anybody else has. Same with sex. Seek out the deepest fetishes, the ones hardest to satisfy, as tumescense becomes ever harder to achieve. If necessary tempt yourself with children, sadism, and the brothel business. Forget love as anything but a word repeated as convenient to the gullible. Take actual pride in the loss,of feelings you no longer feel. You and your milk can be the toughest, meanest, most unscrupulous sonsofbitches in the valley, because you know, deep down, that an afterlife is just a ridiculous notion of dead fools. I mean, look at it. Look. At. It.
Occam’s Spaghetti Monster
I have an alternative of my own. Replace the Razor. How about this?
The Occam Featherduster
No need to cut down opposition arguments by slicing them to draw blood. Pull out the featherduster instead and brush away the dust,of old, unexamined assumptions, the dirt of lies that may be repeated but never removed to look for logic and truth beneath the surface.
Of course, at times the dirt will be too crusty, too defaced by mold and bullshit. When it will be time for the advanced model:
No truth is so simple and correct that it can’t survive a little heat. Learn how to apply it like smart men have done before:
I’ll leave the last words to those guys, but I will provide links to related posts from the Pat some of you might find interesting or helpful:
No Mystery: We All Know What the Height of America Was
An Organized Depiction of the Skeptic’s’ Universe
What We Owe All those Evil White Men
P.S. It’s been pointed out to me that I haven’t addressed the feminist angle on Occam’s Razor. Didn’t want to overcomplicate an already complex subject. The feminist aspects of the topic are not that complicated. I’ll post a brief Appendix later dealing with them in particular. It will be a lot shorter than this post. UPDATE 4/8/25: Appendix: Billie of Ockham
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