Stuff You Should Know - How Occam's Razor Works

Episode Date: May 24, 2018

You know the rule that says the simplest explanation is probably the correct one? That’s called a razor and it’s meant to guide logic. But over time it’s become a broadsword used to disprove opposing arguments. Learn how to spot a faux skeptic in this episode. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hey, everybody, tour announcement. It's just me, Chuck. Josh isn't here for this one. We had to get it out the door. So apologies for 50% of stuff you should know,

but we have added two dates to the 2018 tour, and there may be another couple to come. You never know, but everybody. We asked Salt Lake Cityans and Utahns, should we come there? And boy, we heard from you. So we're coming, it's that easy. Tuesday, October 23rd, we are coming to Salt Lake City

for an evening with stuff you should know at the Grand Theater, and we are super excited. Tell you what, you guys really came through on the emails and social meds, and let us know that we would see some love if we came to Salt Lake City, a city we've talked about often in the past. So we are coming.

Tuesday, October 23rd, and we decided, hey, we're gonna be out there. We might as well add another city that we've never been to. So it is your lucky day, Phoenix, Arizona. And dare I say Tucson and the greater Phoenix area, drive over to Phoenix and come see us on Wednesday, October 24th at the Van Buren.

And this is also an evening with stuff you should know. I don't even know what that means, but it sounds a little more regal than normal. So come see us October 23rd and 24th, Salt Lake City in Phoenix. You know what, I don't even know if tickets are on sale. I believe by the time this announcement goes up, tickets will be on sale,

and you can go to the Van Buren website or to the Grand Theater website to get your ticket links. I will try and have them up very soon on sysklive.com, but don't know if I'll get to that today, but look forward soon, and we can't wait to see you guys. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant,

and there's guest producer Tristan over there. So it's Stuff You Should Know. I don't know how these are gonna release, but as you've noticed, Tristan weirdly grew out his mustache in the last hour again. He's quick. He is very fast. He can make it go in and out, in and out.

Boop, boop, boop, boop, boop. What is that? It's in it, like he's growing his mustache, and it's sucking it back in. Oh, okay. Growing it out, sucking it back in. You know, like a reverse Play-Doh. Do you remember that Play-Doh set with the-

Like the little meat grinder? No, there was one where like you could grow a mustache on a dude, if I remember correctly. Oh, I think I remember that. Yeah, but imagine if you could reverse it too. It was called the Play-Doh Nightmare Set. Is that your nightmare, growing a Play-Doh mustache, waking up like that?

Yeah, I've had that dream about once a week for about 35 years. Like all the rest of you is Chuck, but just your mustache is Wallace and Gromit. Yeah, dude, yesterday I, there was a bad smell. Emily and I were having a glass of wine at a wine bar. There was a bad smell nearby.

I think it was a dumpster or something. And they were growing fresh herbs at this wine bar. And I rubbed a rosemary bush and then swiped it all over my mustache. And Emily's mind was blown. She was just like, oh my God. Like I can't believe like that's an actual use for facial hair.

Yeah, I guess it is. Just to hold in that smell. I was like, well, you can wipe it on your upper lip. It's probably the same thing. Sure. The hair retains more essential oils. I don't know, maybe. Which essential oils, man,

people are clamoring for that episode. Yeah, we should do that. We will eventually. It's been a big part of my life for two to 12 years now. Essential oils, we'll talk about it someday, but not today, no, no. Because Chuck's gonna stumble through a philosophy podcast.

It's a, yeah, I guess it is philosophy. It's the philosophy of knowledge. Epistemology is another way to put it. But specifically, Chuck, we were talking today about a little ditty you may have heard of before called Occam's razor. Called the gambler. Have you ever, you'd heard of Occam's razor before, right?

Well, so much so that I thought for sure we had covered this, but I realized that we just talked about it quite a bit in the scientific method episode. I'm not at all surprised because a lot of people say that the basis of science, which is how humans approach nature in our universe and us and everything scientifically,

the basis of that is Occam's razor. And if Occam's razor sounds familiar, but you can't quite place it, you've probably heard it as something like given two possible outcomes or explanations or whatever, the simplest version is probably the right one. Yeah, it's a pretty, even that in its simplicity is beautiful. The mere statement itself is an example of its simplicity

and how wonderful it can be just to think like, yeah, you know what? Let's cut through all the gobbledygook. I think the easiest way to explain this, whether it's a, what do you call the orb in a photo? An orb? Yeah, it's not your great grandfather coming to visit you on a different plane.

It's really just an error with your photograph. Or it's the flash reflecting off a water vapor in the air. Or Kennedy probably acted alone, Kennedy. He shot himself from afar. Yeah, I clearly meant to say Oswald acted alone because that is the simplest explanation, not this very convoluted, deep plot that goes, that a hundred people were involved in

to assassinate Kennedy. So we'll talk about all that because- That's a teaser. What you're doing right now has become pretty standard. You're using Occam's razor to disprove other people's points. Yeah. This is a total and complete misuse of Occam's razor. Occam's razor is not the original intention.

The original intention had nothing to do with saying that's wrong. It is just a heuristic device, a guide, a rule of thumb that tells you that because things tend to be more simple in the universe, if you're doing something, don't make it harder than it has to be. Don't add more to it than is needed to get the job done. Right.

And there's actually a couple of ways to put this. And both of them get attributed to William of Occam, who we'll talk about in a second. Yeah, Billy Occam. But one is called, he sounds like a baseball manager. Yeah. But one is called the principle of plurality. Yeah.

It's harder to say fast than you would think. It is. And that is translated from the Latin plurality should not be posited without necessity. And the other is the principle of parsimony, which is it is pointless to do with more, what is done with less. From what I understand, they are one and the same.

Oh, really? I could not find anyone who could explain the difference. And I see them interchangeably, not just like on some dude's blog, but on like, you know, the internet encyclopedia philosophy or the Stanford encyclopedia philosophy, like they don't seem to be different. Well, parsimony, it seems different to me

because that specifically is like not using resources, not spending money if you don't have to. And that seems different than plurality. Okay, well then let's explore. So plurality, adding to something, doubling something maybe, just making it more than just the singular. He's saying plurality should not be positive without necessity, right?

So I guess what he's saying then, if they are different, then if you're guessing at something, if you're trying to explain something, don't make it harder than it is. Don't make it bigger than is absolutely necessary to explain it. Yeah, that makes sense. Or, and this is a really big point

that we'll see in a minute, William of Acom really was saying, don't add on to something beyond what you know to be true and correct. Which a lot of people over time, and I think he actually maybe explicitly was an empiricist, have said William of Acom was an empiricist. He was saying that you need to experience things

through your senses to know that they are true. Yes, empirical evidence, if I can look at it, or smell it, or taste it, or feel it, what's the fifth one? Tickle it. Tickle it, and then the sixth one of course we know, means Bruce Willis is really dead. See the ghost of it. Yeah, if there's no empirical evidence,

if you cannot experience it with one of your senses, then it's poo pooed. So it is, and those two things like you really, especially modern science, especially science these days, you put them together. It's given two things, go with the simpler explanation, and you don't believe anything that you can't sense one way or another through your senses empirically, right?

You put those together, you have the basis for modern science. And so the idea that things that are simpler are better, or the idea that the universe is simpler, like when you start to think about it, it's all over the place, right? Like the idea that the universe is based on simpler being better is found everywhere, right?

So like there's things, things have fewer parts, things that require less energy. The encapsulation of larger ideas into smaller amounts of words or theories or whatever, all of these things are very much prized by humanity. So it just kind of makes sense that Occam's razor is a sensible thing, and that you could actually use it

to uncover the mysteries of the universe. But again, that's not really necessarily the case to tell you the truth. No, I mean, there's gonna 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, you know? What's weird is, 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, all right, should we take a break early? Okay, yeah.

I think we should take a break now, because I need to get my head wrapped around this. We'll come back, get in the way back machine, and visit Billy Occam. Okay. So, we'll see you guys in a minute. Bye. Bye.

Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger

and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s.

Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart Radio app, or the Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart Podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road.

Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God.

Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander

each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen, so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. So now Billy Ockham sounds like a 1980s recording star. Oh, sure. Like Billy Ocean. Yeah. Get off of my razor and get into my car.

What's this big hit? 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 Ockham's razor. So let's go back and meet Billy Ockham, shall we? 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 Ockham, 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. 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, this is, it was a big deal, right? Yeah, and he is not, 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 was 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. He could put it on a bumper sticker and a t-shirt and sell it. 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 Gross Test, 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.

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.

Is that the end? Naturally, 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 a hundred years,

William of Occam comes along and he's just like, plurality should not be positive without necessity, Robert. Yeah. And Robert was like, well, yeah, I guess that's one way you could say it. So I wanna 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 Occam'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 Occam. So is William of Occam just a know nothing? No. No, his writings definitely included this stuff and he never took credit for this, but they think that it was actually John's Dunn-Scottis who encapsulated it the way that we tend to think of it now.

So he sold all the bumper stickers. But right, but William of Occam thought this way and he was a radical thinker and a rationalist as we'll see. 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 in several of his monk brothers and I take that to mean not real brothers, right? Right. Where 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 the 22nd saying he's a heretic and people ultimately believed him. 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 Occam 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. 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. But ultimately you were 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 Joachim 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. 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, 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 standup 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. 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.

And also had a metal band called Medieval Synthesis. 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.

No, but all right, so we were talking earlier about empirical evidence and how that kind of fits in here in the fact that if you can't, you know, like you know the sky's 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 Lorentz 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. So Lorentz 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. Einstein didn't. And so the one we talk about today is Einstein and not Lorentz. 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. So Einstein, you know, he won that great battle. 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. And one day my brain's gonna end up in a jar in some guy's garage in New Jersey. Right, and everybody'll love that picture of me

with my tongue sticking out. And Walter Matha will play me in a romantic comedy. So Lorentz 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?

And I didn't mean ether and everyone went, no, no, no. It's too late, Lorentz. We heard you buddy. And he's still, I mean, he's a respected, 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. And 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 Lorentz's manic ravings. Yeah. And I don't believe we mentioned, there's a word for that. If you can't prove it empirically, it doesn't exist. It's called positivism. Yes.

Positivism isn't about having a good attitude. Right. And so this is, 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, he...

That's way better than Ernst. Or just one, yeah. Ernst Mach. He was so nuts on empiricism. He was a 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 working career where he actually beat Lorenz, his rival to this theory through Occam's razor.

But he also disproved this idea of that Ernst Mach, this thing about only believing what you can sense with your senses is 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. ["Payback"] ["Payback"] On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses

and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references

to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist?

So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s,

called on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new I Heart Podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing.

Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear.

And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step.

Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Oh, just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass

on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Okay, Chuck. Okay, Chuck, so who, who uses Occam's razor? Obviously, everyone who was throwing money down on the cock fight between Lawrence and Einstein were using Occam's razor. They all went with Einstein's

because this was the simplest, right? Yeah. Who else uses it? Well, I mean, you have a great section in this article about skeptics. And I know over the years of the show, over the past 10 years, we've had a lot of minor scraps with the skeptic community.

Yeah, that's a pretty minor. Is that fair to say? Yeah. Because, I mean, we have our skeptical side for sure, but there, you know, when it comes to skepticism and skeptics, it's sort of 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. 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, you pull a little tough 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. 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. 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 is this is the most simple explanation. It's 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, we'll know I can fire back two words, photographic mishap, or maybe just mishap, if they wanna 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. 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 it, 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, 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. 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 that 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. 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. 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. So this is the simplest explanation. Occam's razor proves that God exists. 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 because their point is if the universe tends towards simplicity and God is perfect and simplicity is perfection, then if God exists to 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, 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. 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.

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, man, 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? Right. But what this point is saying is that there's, 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. Right, or there's a cow with one stomach that we can compare it to. 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. Sure. 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, that's a human construct. Well, yeah, but in like, let's say in terms of engineering,

it's probably a decent model to think, hey, the more complex the 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 you might need, it might need to be a little bit complicated

to run at its most efficient, you know? Right, yeah, exactly. Or art, I mean, that's a whole different can of worms. That's entirely subjective. Like, you might find one drummer that says, less is more, you just need to provide that basic backbeat and leave room. And then you, Stuart Copeland comes in the room

and laughs and punches you in the face because you look like Sting. Thumbs you in the head. You know, so 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.

So again, it's just subjective as to simplicity. And maybe, I don't know, can you apply it to art? Am I wrong there? No, not necessarily. I think that's a good point because it's subjectively valuing something, whether it's complexity or whether it's simplicity, it doesn't mean it's right.

That's the point, right? That's the thing that's your point is one's not right over the other. Yeah, I think that's my point. 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. 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 gonna thump you. 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. You don't want to be too. You don't want to punch someone in the face. No, no. Plus, I mean, like 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.

There's nothing wrong with it. Doesn't, like not everything has to be funneled through this Occam's razor thing and made simpler just to make it better. Yeah. Well, Chuck, we made it through this one. Sort of. It's better than Jack Hammers.

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. All right, I'm going to call this North Korea part two. We heard from a woman in Australia, we were corrected. It just starts with a nest. There is no awe. Right. A woman in Australia named Claire Sutherland, who actually had an interaction in a way with North Korea

when she was editor at Australian newspaper called Little M, Big X. Okay. It's MX, but. It's just X. Oh, is it? No, I don't know. They don't say awe before Australia, so.

Oh, I got you. Probably not the little lamb. Well, she's based in Elborn, and they have additions in Melbourne, Sydney, and Brisbane. And she says, during the London Olympics and our daily metal 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

in North Korea. Sure enough, there was a flowery diatribe in the Communist English, which misnamed their paper Metro, by the way, and called us Sorted Bullying and Petty Thieves, declaring we would be cursed long in Olympic history. 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. And 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. At the time, we thought it was equal parts, ridiculous and funny.

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. 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 stuffpodcast.

at howstuffworks.com. And as always, join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slipdresses and choker

necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life.

Tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast, and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say, bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.