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April 9, 2025 - Lionel Nation
14:39
You’ve Been Using 'Occam’s Razor' All Wrong—And It’s Making You Miss Everything That Matters
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I had to finally do this.
I was watching a discussion about CIA tactics and there was a fellow who I'm not going to mention his name, but all of a sudden he comes out with this ridiculous notion about, well, Occam's Razor.
Occam's Razor.
Occam's Razor.
Everybody thinks they use Occam's Razor.
Thank you, darling.
Occam's Razor.
And they have this idea that somehow it means what?
Simple?
They don't even know what it means.
It just drives me crazy.
They've never researched it.
They're using it incorrectly.
I will guarantee you.
And this is the part that just drives me absolutely nuts.
They keep saying this and they casually throw around Occam's razor as if it were some kind of, I don't know, golden rule for solving all the mysteries of science or medicine or politics.
It's crazy.
This is what they say.
This is their quote.
The simplest explanation is usually the correct one.
This is what they say.
Smugly and incorrectly assuming that they've somehow cracked the code with a single pithy phrase.
But they're wrong!
That's a misquote.
That's not what it's about.
It never said that at all.
And more often than that, or than not I should say, it's a total misapplication.
The far more grounded and practical alternative, which is Hickam's dictum, which I think is more interesting.
I go more with Hickam.
And I don't mean Dwayne Hickman, that's Dobie Gillis, and that's Hickman versus Hickam, but I digress.
So let's set the record straight, okay?
And while we're at it, let's tear down these, I don't know, this lazy thinking that props up a false understanding of Occam's razor.
First, Let's define the two, okay?
Occam's razor.
Named, of course, after 14th century friar William of Occam.
It's spelled differently, but anyway, but it's often misquoted as something like, the simplest explanation is most likely correct.
Never said that.
Never, never, never said that.
What is actually suggested is that one should not Multiply entities beyond necessity.
That was the original story.
Don't multiply entities beyond necessity.
That was the original construction.
That means, when you're faced with competing explanations, the one that makes the fewest assumptions should be preferred.
Not...
Necessarily the one that's shortest, or easiest, or most appealing, or easier to understand or grasp.
That's it.
It's about assumptions.
Now, compare that, this is my favorite, with Hickam's dictum, which is a principle born from the medical world, and the phrase is, kind of funny, because there's a quote, patients can have as many diseases as they damn well please, okay?
And it pushes back against the dangerous overuse and misapplication and misunderstanding of Occam's razor in clinical diagnoses, where trying to tie every symptom to a single cause can blind a doctor.
It can be very dangerous to the complexity of reality.
Now, simply put, nature isn't obligated to be tidy.
It's not the way that works.
Here's where the misunderstanding turns into a real problem.
People confuse simple with realistic.
Occam's razor is about limiting assumptions, not outcomes.
The simplest answer isn't always the correct one.
It's the one that requires the fewest leaps of logic to get there.
For example, let's say your car doesn't start.
And you might say, well, what do we do?
How do we apply Occam's ratio?
Well, sure, the simplest guess might be that the battery is dead.
That's the simplest.
But what if it's the battery and the starter and the transmission and something else?
Or shorten the wiring and a blown fuse?
Okay, real life, like medicine, often involves multiple issues.
Kind of interacting simultaneously.
We hate that.
So the lazy use of Occam's razor has become a kind of an intellectual crutch.
People toss it around in debates to dismiss more complicated or inconvenient theories without addressing the actual evidence.
So instead of digging deeper, they cling and they hang on to simplicity as if complexity.
It's a sign of falsehood.
Or, nature doesn't like complex.
The hell it doesn't!
Thank God Watson and Quick didn't think that.
In fact, complexity is often the fingerprint of truth.
It's the fingerprint.
It's the M.O. of nature.
And the real world is messy.
Systems interact.
Problems stack.
It's kind of a multiple vortex of things.
In fact, F. Scott Fitzgerald said, and I paraphrase, something to the effect of the example of the most advanced mind is somebody who can handle seemingly or mutually inconsistent and incomparable and incompatible theories simultaneously without losing your mind.
You know, the world is in the textbook.
It doesn't work like this.
Now, this is where Hickam's dictum punches back.
I like this even better.
It reminds us, The reality isn't always going to tie up in a neat little bow.
Let's take a real-world medical example, okay?
Let's say you have a patient who shows up with fatigue, chest pain, and shortness of breath.
Okay?
And Occam's razor approach might look for a single disease, I should say falsely applied, Occam's razor approach.
But they look for a kind of a single pathology, single disease that accounts for all three symptoms.
Like heart failure.
But what if the patient has anemia and asthma and anxiety?
That's not some wild coincidence.
It's common.
So human bodies, as you know, are complex and so are the problems they develop and the way these problems interconnect and inter- dynamically coordinate.
So this principle applies outside of medicine, too.
In politics, blaming, for example, economic collapse on tariffs or on a single policy is tempting, but in reality, economic shifts result from a web, waves, a concatenation of causes.
Tax code changes or market psychology, geopolitical tensions, war, supply chain distributions, all of them working together.
Now, in law, Assuming someone committed a crime, because they had that classic TV thing motive and opportunity, might make for a clean TV script.
But real investigations in real life demand looking at every angle, even when the truth is complicated.
You see, this obsession with simplest leads to very dangerous oversimplifications.
It can justify ignoring inconvenient truths or dismissing systemic problems or even denying scientific nuance.
Climate change?
It's just natural cycles.
Vaccine problems?
Big Pharma is evil or eagle.
Equalry.
Geopolitical conflicts, wars.
It's all about oil!
It's about race.
Why are Americans more obese?
Because we don't get enough exercise.
I mean, we just have to...
It's Occam's razor for you.
These are overly simplistic narratives dressed up as common sense.
They multiply assumptions.
They ignore evidence.
They usually serve a kind of an agenda, meaning a particular outcome you want.
So let's stop letting people weaponize Occam's razor as a rhetorical shortcut.
It was never meant to be a bludgeon or some kind of modality against complexity.
It's often done like this, like these two people talking about torture.
It was meant to be a scalpel for trimming unnecessary assumptions.
Not for cutting out inconvenient or problem or difficult complexity.
Hickam's dictum, on the other hand, forces us to confront that reality doesn't owe us simplicity.
It reminds us that we have to wrestle with difficult truths, with multiple vectors of causation and the discomfort of ambiguity.
So, to be clear, Listen to me carefully.
Occam's razor has value when used properly.
It can help steer us away from conspiracy theories sometimes, that's right, that are unfounded speculation.
But when you misuse it, it becomes a shield for intellectual laziness.
Hickam's dictum, though messier, I'm an HD fan, by the way, is often more grounded and based.
In reality, because it doesn't assume the universe is doing us any favors.
You see?
So let's all of us call out this smug, this theatrical overconfidence that often comes with invoking Occam's razor.
It becomes a way to dismiss arguments, silence deeper inquiry, or to pretend complexity is just a form of evasion or error.
But in the real world, Truth doesn't always sit in the center of the Venn diagram.
You know, sometimes it's hiding in the overlapping chaos of multiple messy truths and the like.
So, remember this.
The job of any serious thinker, anybody who's a critical thinker, anybody who's into issue analysis, is not to look for the answer that feels simplest, but the one that requires the fewest leaps of faith.
That's the original spirit of Occam.
And the job of any practical thinker, any good thinker, any critical thinker, is to accept that multiple intersecting causes are often the rule, not the exception.
That's Hickam.
So both have their place, but in a world that thrives on complexity and nuance and layered reality, Hickam's dictum deserves a lot more respect.
And I'll bet you've never heard of it until today.
And Occam's razor needs to be stripped of its...
I don't want to say that.
It's kind of like this fanboy mythology.
So if you're reaching for a mental tool, some kind of an instrument to cut through confusion, pick the one...
That deals with reality as it is.
Not as you wish it were.
Simplicity is great for math problems.
Absolutely.
But for life?
For the real world?
Give me something that can handle the mess.
Give me Hickam's dictum.
That's what I want you to understand.
Okay?
I hope this helps because every time I hear somebody misquote this, it's like every time I hear Victor Davis Hanson mispronounce a name, Latita James.
I go crazy.
So there, now you're smart.
And also, review this yourself.
You'd be surprised sometimes how much...
Medical science gives us.
I remember a friend of mine asked me, or I asked him, I said, what's the cause of cancer?
Is it environmental?
Is it genetic?
He said, yes.
There's another one too I like.
Somebody who said, this is a great medical school term.
If you hear hoofbeats, don't think zebra.
You know, don't think exotic.
Look at things for what it is.
And by the way, when you get to the truth, Don't reject it because it's not popular.
Okay?
I'll leave it at that.
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