The Stuff You Should Know Doin’ Science Playlist: How Occam's Razor Works

10:50Chuck Bryant:But again, that's not really necessarily the case, to tell you the truth.

10:53Josh Clark:No, I mean, there's going to be a lot of, and this stuff is kind of fun, just a lot of back and forth on Occam's Razor throughout this whole thing. Because there is no, and that's kind of part of the whole jam of Occam's Razor, is there is no right or wrong here.

11:09Chuck Bryant:Right.

11:09Josh Clark:You know? What's weird is. Not right.

11:12Chuck Bryant:A lot of people point to it, though, that it's, oh, this is right. I just proved you wrong, Occam's Razor. And that's just not true. Oh, man.

11:19Josh Clark:All right. Should we take a break early?

11:22Chuck Bryant:Okay. Yeah.

11:23Josh Clark:I think we should take a break now because I need to get my head wrapped around this. And we'll come back, get in the Wayback Machine, and visit Billy Ockham.

11:30Chuck Bryant:Okay.

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13:23Chuck Bryant:So now Billy Ockham sounds like a 1980s recording star. Oh, sure. Like Billy Ocean.

13:31Josh Clark:Yeah. Get off of my razor and get into my car was his big hit.

13:37Chuck Bryant:So we should say the razor, too, it's a philosophical term. It's a term of philosophy. the razor you use to scrape away unnecessary stuff. So it's Occam's razor. So let's go back and meet Billy Occam, shall we?

13:56Josh Clark:Yeah, and you wrote this, by the way, back in your article, Writing Days. And you point out very astutely that this is from a time in our history of the world where you might not have had a surname. You may have been William of Occam. which is the case here, which is in England. And he lived between about 1285 and 1349. And he was a philosophical dude and a Franciscan monk. And he very much, like you point out, took his vow of poverty very seriously and lived a very meager, humble life.

14:34Chuck Bryant:Yeah, he did. He also expected the church to take the same vow of poverty. And he actually butted heads with the church quite a bit, so much so that he ended up getting excommunicated, as we'll see. But he was the real deal as far as like a true believer went. The weird thing about William of Ockham was that he was also a genuinely independent thinker and a rationalist, which at the time, rationalism and the church did not go hand in hand. There was really not much rationalism. So the idea for this upstart Franciscan monk to start questioning the ideas of the church, and not only that, but how the leaders of the church conducted themselves and how much money they surrounded themselves with and how much power they had politically, it was a big deal, right?

15:27Josh Clark:Yeah, and he did not invent this line of thought as much as he's probably attributed to this to people that just know him from like a Jeopardy board. He, this is already a line of thought well established by this time in the medieval times. And he was just, he kind of boiled it down to those two sentences that you were talking about. So anyone could understand it and he could put it on a bumper sticker and a t-shirt and sell it.

15:54Chuck Bryant:Right, so it was Aristotle who was the guy who came up with this idea first that simplicity equals perfection and perfection equals simplicity. He said, the more perfect a nature is, the fewer means it requires for its operation, right? I love that. So that makes sense. That speaks to me. But then over time in between Aristotle and William, it kind of got expanded. So let me give you an example of that same thought from Robert Grostest, who was an early scientist, also a theologian, I believe, too. Here is his version of it. That is better and more valuable, which requires fewer other circumstances being equal.

16:32Chuck Bryant:For if one thing were demonstrated from many and another thing from fewer equally known premises, clearly that is better, which is from fewer, because it makes us know quickly, just as a universal demonstration is better than particular because it produces knowledge from fewer premises. Similarly, in natural science, in moral science, and in metaphysics, the best is that which needs no premises and that better, that which needs the fewer other circumstances being equal. Boy, the ironies there are rich. Right. So within less than 100 years, William of Ockham comes along and he's just like, plurality should not be positive without necessity, Robert.

17:14Josh Clark:Yeah. And Robert was like, well, yeah, I guess that's one way you could say it.

17:17Chuck Bryant:So I want to say something, though, before we keep going, Chuck. I actually found a correction of my own article that I missed before. What's that? It turns out that they think now that another theologian slash scientist from William of Ockham's era named John Dunn Scottis was the one who really encapsulated this principle of plurality and principle of parsimony. And that it was a guy from the 19th century, William Rowan Hamilton, a British mathematician, that he was the one who misattributed it to William of Ockham. So is William of Ockham just a know-nothing? No. No, his writings definitely included this stuff.

18:02Chuck Bryant:And he never took credit for this.

18:04Josh Clark:Okay.

18:05Chuck Bryant:But they think that it was actually Johns Dunn-Scott who encapsulated it the way that we tend to think of it now. So he stole all the bumper stickers. But right. But William of Ockham thought this way, and he was a radical thinker and a rationalist, as we'll see.

18:21Josh Clark:Right. And like you kind of teased out earlier, he did butt heads with the church over this. He wrote a lot about it, and the church was not into it. And Pope John, the, what is that, 22nd? They kind of squared off on this. And, of course, the pope wins all battles, at least back then. And he was excommunicated, and several of his monk brothers, and I take that to mean not real brothers, right? Were excommunicated in 1328. He went to Munich seeking refuge. He was protected there by Emperor Louis IV. And ultimately, he won out because he started writing papers about Pope John XXII saying he's a heretic.

19:09Josh Clark:and people ultimately believed him.

19:12Chuck Bryant:Right. He definitely made some pretty convincing points. And he also, again, like if you're saying, I took a vow of poverty, the church really should too. And the church isn't poverty stricken and you are, that gives you a little more credibility from the outset as well. Sure. So there's some reasons why William of Ockham is, this theologian, a devout Franciscan monk, is looked upon as one of the fathers of Western science. like the foundation of Western science, right? Or science in general. And the reason why is he argued against the prevailing ideas at the time, which is called medieval synthesis.

19:50Chuck Bryant:And this is very much championed by Thomas Aquinas, who's a famous theologian. I believe he was a saint. And one of the reasons he was canonized was because of this, thinking about this. But the whole medieval synthesis thing was that God was first and foremost everything, right? You were a member of the church just as much as you were a member of your country, a citizen of your country. All human knowledge came from God. And Thomas Aquinas, it wasn't just like the end. Thomas Aquinas used philosophy to prove that sentiment, that all human knowledge came from God, and here is how. And basically, it took the idea of cause and effect and said that you can trace every effect back to a cause, back to another effect, back to another cause.

20:37Chuck Bryant:but ultimately you're going to end up on God. And that all of our conceptions of everything arose from God's conception and that God willed that we understand things this way, which means that this is the perfect way to understand it, which means it's right, right? So that is not what William Wackham thought. He was, again, a rationalist who said, no, we tend to think things are things because that arises in the human mind from cognition, not from God. And this dude was not a heretic. He believed that you didn't apply rationalism to God, that God required faith. And rationalism stood on its own.

21:18Chuck Bryant:It was a different thing. And you couldn't know God through your senses. God was elsewhere. Leave God out of this. and the fact that he was able to really successfully lay like a philosophical groundwork for this, a rational groundwork for it. It's one thing today to be like, oh, I'm a secular humanist, you know? I'm rational. Forget the church. That's today. This is at a time when this guy is saying this, and the church has the power to burn you at the stake. Like he was a stand-up rational thinker, right? Which kind of makes him a hero of rationality today. But don't, and this is another perfect example of how Occam's razor gets confused.

21:57Chuck Bryant:Occam himself gets confused too. He's a hero of science, but he was also one of the more devout human beings walking the earth at the time. And was a monk for basically his whole life.

22:08Josh Clark:And also had a metal band called Medieval Synthesis.

22:12Chuck Bryant:Oh, that is a good name, isn't it? So he was just a conundrum. Yeah, he was a conundrum for sure. And again, he got excommunicated. He had to escape by horse. Stolen horse. Ooh. I mean, he was not very monk-like.

22:25Josh Clark:No, but, all right, so we were talking earlier about empirical evidence and how that kind of fits in here and the fact that if you can't, you know, like, you know the sky is blue because you look up and you see it's blue. You know a bird makes a whistle because you can hear the bird make a whistle. so it's very easy to sort of use that and say sure but if you don't if you can't see it or hear it empirically or any of the senses experience it it's very easy to poo poo and you give a great example here with Lorenz and Einstein and kind of which one would win out so both of these guys both physicists, Einstein obviously more popular, we'll see for a very important reason, they both had the conclusion mathematically that with the space-time continuum, the closer we get to moving at the speed of light, the more we slow down, which is hard to wrap your head around.

23:24Josh Clark:So Lorenz comes out and says, explains it away because of changes that take place in the ether, which he might as well have said a bit of magic happens. Mm-hmm. Einstein didn't. And so the one we talk about today is Einstein and not Lorenz. That explanation of Einstein was more rooted in science, and he didn't say something wacky like the ether, which is something empirically you can't see or smell or taste. Right. So Einstein, you know, he won that great battle.

23:55Chuck Bryant:Yeah, he very famously said, he goes, I don't know what's what, but I know it ain't got nothing to do with no ether.

24:05Josh Clark:and one day my brain's going to end up in a jar in some guy's garage in new jersey

24:09Chuck Bryant:right and everybody will love that picture of me with my tongue sticking out and walter mathau will play me in a romantic comedy so lawrence violated that principle of plurality right he added something to this that required an additional basically like a leap of faith there was no empirical evidence that there was such a thing as the ether and he said did i say ether

24:30Josh Clark:And I didn't mean ether and everyone went, no, no, no. It's too late, Lorentz. We heard you, buddy.

24:35Chuck Bryant:And he's still, I mean, he's a respected physicist still. It's not like he was some crackpot or anything like that. Because if you put his equations and Einstein's equations side by side, they came to the same conclusions. It was just explaining how Lorentz seems to have misstepped, right? Right. But he was obviously at least as brilliant as Einstein when it comes to that. He's just a little nuts, apparently. Right. So he violates the principle of plurality, and now we understand relativity rather than Lorenz's manic ravings.

25:06Josh Clark:Yeah, and I don't believe we mentioned there is a word for that. If you can't prove it empirically, it doesn't exist. It's called positivism.

25:12Chuck Bryant:Yes.

25:13Josh Clark:Positivism isn't about having a good attitude.

25:15Chuck Bryant:Right, and this also happened during Einstein's working days, too. There was a guy named Ernest Mach, and Ernest Mach was so— Ernst. Ernst Mach, thank you. Yeah, no E. That's way better than Ernst. Or just one, yeah. Ernst Mach. He was so nuts on empiricism. He was an early, I think he was a physicist, if not a mathematician, one of the two. And he basically said, like, molecules don't exist. All this whole bubble over molecules and atoms and all this stuff, you're all crazy. We can't see them. They don't exist. So there's this kind of ironic twist that came from Einstein's work and career where he actually beat Lorenz, his rival, to this theory through Occam's razor.

26:06Chuck Bryant:But he also disproved this idea that Ernst Mach, this thing about only believing what you can sense with your senses, this kind of other part of Occam's razor, in a subsequent paper that came a few years later that showed that molecules do exist. So the idea that Occam's razor can be used both ways is something that just keeps coming up again and again and again. And we'll talk about how after a break. How about that? Yeah, let's do it.

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28:30Chuck Bryant:Okay, Chuck. So who uses Occam's razor? Obviously, everyone who was throwing money down on the cockfight between Lawrence and Einstein were using Occam's razor. They all went with Einstein's because his was the simplest, right? Who else uses it?

28:48Josh Clark:Well, I mean, you have a great section in this article about skeptics. And I know over the years of this show, over the past 10 years, we've had a lot of minor scraps with the skeptic community. That's a pretty minor. Is that fair to say?

29:03Chuck Bryant:Yeah.

29:04Josh Clark:Because, I mean, we have our skeptical side for sure. But there, you know, when it comes to skepticism and skeptics, there's a it's sort of on a on a sliding scale. There's a range of how you might feel about certain things. And you very astutely, I think, point out that if you are a true skeptic, then you will not use Occam's razor like I did earlier as a tool to disprove something. Right. That you will only use it as a tool to consider different explanations. And that's, there's a big difference there.

29:35Chuck Bryant:There is. So like that whole idea of seeing a ghost on film, right? So, there's this example where somebody could say, so you just explained something about light and refracting and something with the film and there was moisture in the air. Isn't it just simpler to say, no, that was a ghost? Right. Exactly. And in that case, if you're a skeptic, you would pull a little tuft of your hair out. Maybe just start scraping at your cheeks until you bleed. Ideally, what you would say is, I get what you're saying, but you're bringing something into this that we don't know exists. Like, we do know light exists.

30:21Chuck Bryant:We do know it reflects off of vapor. We do know how this can be captured on film. So, yes, that sounds very complicated. but the ghosts don't exist as far as we know. We can't sense them empirically. But I would keep my mind open to the idea that ghosts could conceivably exist. The fact that I just showed that this is the reflection of light off of water vapor in this graveyard does not mean that your hypothesis about ghosts existing is wrong. It just means that's what's in this picture. That's a true skeptic.

30:56Josh Clark:Right, because things happen, and later on, the more fantastical explanation could be true and has been true. And you point out very plainly here that there's a couple of problems with this. And to me, this kind of says it all, is that it's subjective. Like the whole notion of determining this is the most simple explanation is completely subjective because the ghost explanation. One person might say, no, the ghost explanation is clearly the simplest because I can just say one word, ghost. See there? And then you could fire right back. Well, no, I can fire back two words, photographic mishap. Right.

31:42Josh Clark:Or maybe just mishap. Yeah. If they want to, like, keep it completely equal. And that's the most simple. So it's completely subjective as to which one or anything that it's the most simple.

31:52Chuck Bryant:Right, exactly. And then again, the idea that you can use Occam's razor to disprove something just by showing that it's not the simplest explanation, that's not correct. That's not right. And so scientists will use Occam's razor in all sorts of different disciplines. Like, for example, if you're making an artificial neural network, right, like a learning machine, you might use decision trees. and you will use some sort of simple decision tree over a more complicated one that can get the same job done. That doesn't mean that it's necessarily the right one, but there are demonstrably good reasons for picking a simpler one over.

32:33Chuck Bryant:It's less likely to break. It takes less time. It takes less energy to come to the computations. There are things that are valuable about it, but it doesn't mean that the other one is just wrong. And again, when you're using Occam's razor, say if you're making a neural network or you're pouring through a data set or something like that, or you're trying to interpret a big data set.

32:55Josh Clark:Yeah. You're making, again, like you were saying, not just a subjective judgment about what's simpler, but that's all there is to it.

33:04Chuck Bryant:You're making a subjective judgment about what's simpler, not what's right. It's not saying what's right. And this is a recurring theme that you just have to know because there's so many people out there They use Occam's razor to disprove other people's ideas. And that's just not at all what it was originally intended for. It's just a complete perversion of it. And it's just wrong. And that's not how science works. So if you see somebody out there doing this, thump them in the forehead.

33:34Josh Clark:Yeah, and boy, then when you get into theology, it gets really interesting. because this is sort of a prime example of the simplest explanation from a believer's point of view is very easy to say, no, the Big Bang is incredibly complex and complicated, and it's pretty clear that the easiest explanation here and the simplest thing is God created life in seven days. Right. But that's also discounting the process that it took God to create earth, if that's what you believe, and just kind of bundle it up in a tidy package. Say, God created life. The Big Bang is super complicated. So, and very coincidental if you really look at it.

34:18Josh Clark:So, this is the simplest explanation. Occam's razor proves that God exists.

34:23Chuck Bryant:Right. And so, that's been used time and time again by creationists, right? Or people who believe in ghosts or people who counter empiricism in a lot of ways, right? Yeah. But on the other hand, you can find atheists who use Occam's razor to show that God does not exist. Right. Because their point is if the universe tends towards simplicity and God is perfect and simplicity is perfection, then if God existed, the universe would be a lot more simpler. There wouldn't be this Big Bang thing that we have that happened. You would be right, creationists, and the fact that you're wrong means that there is no God.

35:03Chuck Bryant:which is just like my head's starting to spin a little bit with this. But it's a good example of how you can use Occam's razor. Both sides can use Occam's razor to disprove the other person's point, which again shows how it's not meant to be used that way.

35:17Josh Clark:Well, yeah, and then you point out too and talk about a head spinner, like something like photosynthesis is a pretty complex mechanism in nature. But, I mean, who's to say that that isn't the simplest way to achieve food production in a plant. Maybe that is the simplest.

35:35Chuck Bryant:Yeah, we have no way of knowing that there is a simpler model of the universe or photosynthesis or of a shark or anything like that. And that even something that does seem superfluous, we can't say that in the larger scheme of things that it's actually the simplest way to do that. Right? So, like, a shark seems like, maybe do you need that extra fin or something like that? Or does a cow really need eight stomachs? Or do we really need two kidneys? But what this point is saying is that we don't have the information to look at everything on such a grand scheme of things to say, no, if humans only had one kidney, this other larger system would break down, and this is actually the simplest way to do it.

36:20Josh Clark:Right, or there's a cow with one stomach that we can compare it to.

36:23Chuck Bryant:Right, right, exactly. So this whole thing, this is the point, Chuck, where I reach this very glaring idea that Occam's razor or what Aristotle said that simplicity is perfection. That's all man-made. That's human-made. That's a human-made concept. To value simplicity is human-made. It is possible the universe is complicated. You can come up with all sorts of examples of the universe being seemingly pretty complicated. Just the universe itself seems pretty complicated, frankly, right? So that doesn't necessarily mean that the universe tends towards simplicity. It seems like humans value simplicity and the universe uses simplicity a lot, but that doesn't mean that simplicity is perfection or correctness.

37:16Chuck Bryant:That's a human construct.

37:17Josh Clark:Well, yeah, but let's say in terms of engineering, it's probably a decent model to think, hey, the more complex this system is that I'm engineering, the more things there are to break. So we should probably try and make it as simple as possible that still gets the job done. But that's not to say that it can be rudimentary. Like, it might need to be a little bit complicated to run at its most efficient, you know? Right.

37:44Chuck Bryant:Yeah, exactly.

37:45Josh Clark:Or art. I mean, that's a whole different can of worms. you know, that's entirely subjective. Like is, uh, you might find one drummer that says, um, less is more. You just need to provide that basic backbeat and leave room. Uh, and then you, Stuart Copeland comes in the room and, and laughs and punches you in the face cause you look like sting. Thumps you in the head, you know? So that's, that's entirely subjective when it comes to art. Like, you know, You've been to a museum and seen a 12-inch by 12-inch square painted red. And then you've also seen Jackson Pollock or Frida Kahlo. Kahlo. So, again, it's just subjective as to simplicity.

38:32Josh Clark:And maybe, I don't know, can you apply it to art? Am I wrong there?

38:36Chuck Bryant:No, not necessarily. I think that's a good point because it's still subjectively valuing something, whether it's complexity or whether it's simplicity, it doesn't mean it's right. That's the point, right? I think that's your point, is one's not right over the other.

38:53Josh Clark:Yeah, I think that's my point.

38:55Chuck Bryant:And then there's also plenty of circumstances where Occam's razor just doesn't help very much. Like very famously, Ptolemy's idea of the universe, the earth is the center of the universe, the geocentric universe I think is what it's called, where the Earth is the center of the universe, the sun, the moon, all the planets and all the stars revolve around Earth is known to be wrong now. But for a long time, that's what everyone thought until the Copernican Revolution, where we realized that not our universe, but our solar system is sun-centered. The sun is at the center and the Earth is actually moving around it.

39:34Chuck Bryant:The thing is, is if you look at the explanations between the two, They are pretty close. And one's not necessarily less simple than the other. And if you put them side by side, Occam's razor doesn't really help. You have to dig a little deeper and figure it out that, oh, actually, no, this one's right based on these observations. We think this one's right. But it has nothing necessarily to do with complexity. And then on the other side of the equation, just because something's complex doesn't mean that it's wrong. So the next time somebody starts flailing some Occam's razor stuff at you, you tell them, I'm going to thump you.

40:20Chuck Bryant:Do you want to be thumped? Why are you thumping everybody? Me? Yeah. Well, because they're asking for it. Is it just a very mild act of violence? Yeah. Okay. You don't want to be too, you don't want to punch someone in the face. No, no. And plus, I mean, like, you shouldn't. You shouldn't thump anybody anyway. I was totally kidding you. Okay. Okay? Thanks for setting me up for that one. Sure. Oh, one other thing. A lot of people say that Occam's razor squashes free thought. So I think that does kind of tie in with your art thing. You know what I mean? Oh, yeah. Like, feel free to go be complex.

40:54Chuck Bryant:There's nothing wrong with it. Like, not everything has to be funneled through this Occam's razor thing and made simpler just to make it better. Well, Chuck, we made it through this one.

41:05Josh Clark:Sort of.

41:07Chuck Bryant:It's better than jackhammers, I'll tell you that. I think you did well. I think you did as well, man. All right, thanks. That means that it was a good episode. If you want to learn more about Occam's Razor, you could read my so-so article on the site, howstuffworks.com. Just type it in the search bar, and since I said so-so, it's time for listener mail.

41:27Josh Clark:All right, I'm going to call this North Korea Part 2. We heard from a woman in Australia. We were corrected. It just starts with an S. There is no awe.

41:37Chuck Bryant:Right.

41:38Josh Clark:A woman in Australia named Claire Sutherland, who actually had an interaction in a way with North Korea when she was editor at an Australian newspaper called Little M Big X. Okay. It's MX, but...

41:54Chuck Bryant:It's just X.

41:56Josh Clark:Oh, is it?

41:57Chuck Bryant:No, I don't know. They don't say awe before Australia, so... Oh, I gotcha. Probably not the Little M. Well, she's based in Elborn, and they have editions in Melbourne, Sydney, and Brisbane.

42:09Josh Clark:And she says, during the London Olympics in our daily medal tally graphic, we listed North and South Korea as naughty Korea and nice Korea. Just kind of a cheeky thing, I guess. She said, we've been doing this for about a week when we received a call from a Wall Street Journal reporter based in Seoul seeking comment about the fact that North Korea just issued an official condemnation of our paper. and its editor. At first, our assumption was we were being punked, but he directed us to the official PR website of North Korea. Sure enough, there was a flowery diatribe in communist English, which misnamed their paper Metro, by the way, and called us sordid bullying and petty thieves, declaring we would be cursed long in Olympic history.

42:56Josh Clark:I think my favorite extract is this, she says. editors of the paper were so incompetent as to tarnish the reputation of the paper by themselves. By producing the article like that, there is a saying, a straw may show which way the wind blows. A single article may exhibit the level of the paper. Wow. Came down on her. She says, the Wall Street Journal described the official statement as most unusual, and we ended up making some minor international headlines because of it. We ran the statement in full with a story about our sudden entry into world affairs on the front page. The headline was, North Korea Fires Missive.

43:36Josh Clark:At the time, we thought it was equal parts ridiculous and funny. If it happened today, I'd probably try and arrange new identities for me and my staff. Anyway, thanks from me and my dog for the show. Looking forward to seeing you in Melbourne. That is from Claire Sutherland.

43:51Chuck Bryant:Thanks, Claire. That was a great story. Well, you really want this one over, don't you? Sure. If you want to get in touch with me and Chuck with a great story, you can tweet to us. I'm at Josh M. Clark. Chuck's at Movie Crush. We're both at SYSK Podcast. Chuck's on Facebook.com slash Charles W. Chuck Bryant. And we're at Facebook.com slash Stuff You Should Know. You can send us an email to stuffpodcasts at howstuffworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com.

44:25Josh Clark:For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit HowStuffWorks.com.

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45:11Chuck Bryant:Zach, nice vacation spot, but without T-Mobile 5G home internet, it's scary here. Don't open it.

45:19Josh Clark:Relax.

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