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How Occam's Razor Works · Stuff You Should Know

0:00
Speaker 1: Hey, everybody, tour announcement, it's just me. Chuck. Josh isn't
0:06
Speaker 1: here for this one. We had to get it out
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Speaker 1: the door. So apologies for fifty of stuff you should know.
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Speaker 1: But we have added two dates to uh the two
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Speaker 1: thousand eighteen tour, and there may be another couple to come.
0:17
Speaker 1: You never know. But everybody, we asked Salt Lake City
0:20
Speaker 1: ins and Utahn's should we come there, and boy, we
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Speaker 1: heard from you, so we're coming. It's that easy. Tuesday October,
0:29
Speaker 1: we are coming to Salt Lake City for an evening
0:32
Speaker 1: with stuff you should know at the Grand Theater and
0:36
Speaker 1: we are super excited. I'll tell you what. You guys
0:38
Speaker 1: really came through on the emails and social meds and
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Speaker 1: let us know that we would see some love if
0:44
Speaker 1: we came to Salt Lake City, a city we've talked
0:46
Speaker 1: about often in the past. So we are a coming Tuesday,
0:50
Speaker 1: October twenty three, and we decided, hey, we're gonna be
0:52
Speaker 1: out there, we might as well add another city that
0:56
Speaker 1: we've never been to. So it is your lucky day,
0:59
Speaker 1: Phoenix eras Zona and dare I say, Tucson and in
1:03
Speaker 1: the Greater Phoenix area drive over to Phoenix and come
1:06
Speaker 1: see us on Wednesday October at the Van Buren. And
1:11
Speaker 1: this is also an evening with stuff you should know.
1:13
Speaker 1: I don't even know what that means, but it sounds
1:15
Speaker 1: a little more regal than normal. So come see us
1:18
Speaker 1: October Salt Lake City and Phoenix. Uh, you know what,
1:23
Speaker 1: I don't even know if tickets are on sale. I
1:25
Speaker 1: believe by the time this announcement goes up, tickets will
1:28
Speaker 1: be on sale, and you can go to the Van
1:31
Speaker 1: Buren website or to the Grand Theater website to get
1:34
Speaker 1: your ticket links. I will try and have them up
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Speaker 1: very soon on s y s K live dot com,
1:40
Speaker 1: but I don't know if I'll get to that today,
1:41
Speaker 1: but look forward soon and we can't wait to see you, guys.
1:46
Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from House Stuff Works
1:49
Speaker 1: dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark,
1:59
Speaker 1: and there's Charles Chuck Bryant, and there's guest producer Tristan
2:03
Speaker 1: over there, so it's stuff you should know. I don't
2:07
Speaker 1: know how these are going to release, but as you've noticed,
2:09
Speaker 1: Tristan weirdly grew out his mustache in the last hour. Again,
2:14
Speaker 1: he's quick, He's very fast. He can make it go
2:17
Speaker 1: in and out, in and out. Woooo what is that?
2:21
Speaker 1: It's like he's growing his mustache and it's sucking it
2:24
Speaker 1: back in, sucking it back in, you know, like a
2:27
Speaker 1: reverse Plato. Right. Do you remember that Plato set with
2:31
Speaker 1: the like a little meat grinder. No, there was one
2:34
Speaker 1: where like you could grow a mustache on I dude,
2:38
Speaker 1: I think I remember that. I would imagine if you
2:41
Speaker 1: could reverse it too. It was called the Plato Nightmare set. Yeah,
2:48
Speaker 1: is that your nightmare? Growing Plato mustache? Waking up like that? Yeah,
2:52
Speaker 1: I've had that dream about once a week for about
2:55
Speaker 1: thirty five years. Like all the rest of you is chuck,
2:57
Speaker 1: but just your mustaches Wallace and alm it. Yeah, dude. Yesterday,
3:03
Speaker 1: I h there was a bad smell. Emily and I
3:08
Speaker 1: were having a glass of wine at a wine bar
3:10
Speaker 1: and there was a bad smell nearby. I think it
3:12
Speaker 1: was a dumpster or something. And they were growing fresh
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Speaker 1: herbs at this wine bar, and I rubbed a rosemary
3:19
Speaker 1: bush and then swiped it all over my mustache. Uh In.
3:25
Speaker 1: Emily's mind was blown. She was just like, oh my God,
3:30
Speaker 1: like I can't believe, like that's an actual use for
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Speaker 1: facial hair. Yeah, I guess just to hold in that smell.
3:37
Speaker 1: It was like, well, you can wipe it on your
3:38
Speaker 1: upper lip. It's probably the same thing. Maybe the hair
3:41
Speaker 1: retains more essential oils. Which essential oils? Man, people are
3:48
Speaker 1: clamoring for that episode. Yeah, we should do that. We
3:51
Speaker 1: will eventually. It's been a big part of my life
3:53
Speaker 1: for two or twelve years now, essential oils. We'll talk
3:56
Speaker 1: about it someday, but not today. No, no, because Chuck's
4:00
Speaker 1: gonna stumble through a philosophy podcast. It's a yeah, I
4:04
Speaker 1: guess it is philosophy. It's the philosophy of knowledge. Epistemology
4:09
Speaker 1: is another way to put it. But specifically, Chuck, we're
4:12
Speaker 1: talking today about a little ditty you may have heard
4:16
Speaker 1: of before called acams razor, called the Gambler. Have you
4:21
Speaker 1: have you ever you've heard of ocums razor before? Right, Well,
4:24
Speaker 1: so much so that I thought for sure we had
4:26
Speaker 1: covered this, But um, I realized that we just talked
4:29
Speaker 1: about it quite a bit in the scientific methods. I'm
4:33
Speaker 1: not at all surprised because a lot of people say
4:35
Speaker 1: that the basis of science, which is how humans approach
4:40
Speaker 1: um nature in our universe and us and everything. Scientifically,
4:46
Speaker 1: the basis of that is ocams razor and if if
4:50
Speaker 1: acams razor sounds familiar but you can't quite place it,
4:52
Speaker 1: You've probably heard it as something like um, given two
4:57
Speaker 1: possible outcomes or explanations or whatever, the simplest version is
5:03
Speaker 1: probably the right one. Yeah, it's a pretty even that,
5:07
Speaker 1: in its simplicity is is beautiful. The mere statement itself
5:12
Speaker 1: is an example of its simplicity and how wonderful it
5:16
Speaker 1: can be just to think, like, yeah, you know what,
5:18
Speaker 1: let's get through all the gobbledegook. I think the easiest
5:22
Speaker 1: way to explain this, whether it's a a what do
5:29
Speaker 1: you call the orb and a photo Yeah, it's not.
5:33
Speaker 1: It's not your great grandfather coming to visit you on
5:36
Speaker 1: a different plane. It's really just an error with your photograph.
5:40
Speaker 1: Or it's a it's the flash um yeah, reflecting off
5:45
Speaker 1: like water vapor in the air. Or Kennedy probably acted alone.
5:50
Speaker 1: Kennedy he shot himself from afar. Yeah. I clearly meant
5:56
Speaker 1: to say Oswald acted alone, because that is a plus explanation,
6:01
Speaker 1: not this very convoluted deep um plot that goes that
6:09
Speaker 1: a hundred people were involved in to assassinate Kennedy. So
6:13
Speaker 1: we'll talk about all that, because what you're doing right
6:16
Speaker 1: now is has become pretty standard. You're using ocams razor
6:20
Speaker 1: to disprove other people's points. There's this is a total
6:25
Speaker 1: and complete misuse of ocams razors, not the original intention.
6:31
Speaker 1: The original intention had nothing to do with saying that's wrong.
6:35
Speaker 1: Is just a heuristic device, a guide, a rule of
6:39
Speaker 1: thumb that tells you that, because things tend to be
6:44
Speaker 1: more simple in the universe, if you if you're doing something,
6:49
Speaker 1: don't make it harder than it has to be. Don't
6:52
Speaker 1: add more to it than is needed to get the
6:54
Speaker 1: job done. And there's actually a couple of ways to
6:57
Speaker 1: put this, and both of them get attributed to William
7:00
Speaker 1: of Ockham, who will talk about in a second. But
7:04
Speaker 1: one is called he sounds like a baseball manager. But
7:07
Speaker 1: one is called the principle of plurality harder to say
7:11
Speaker 1: fast than you would think, and that is translated from
7:15
Speaker 1: the Latin plurality should not be positive without necessity. And
7:19
Speaker 1: the other is the principle of parsimony, which is it
7:21
Speaker 1: is pointless to do with more what is done with less.
7:25
Speaker 1: From what I understand, they are one and the same
7:29
Speaker 1: Oh really, I could not find anyone who could explain
7:33
Speaker 1: the difference. And I see them interchangeably, not just like
7:37
Speaker 1: on some dudes blog, but unlike you know, the the
7:42
Speaker 1: the Internet Encyclopedia Philosophy or the Stanford Encyclopedia Philosophy, like
7:47
Speaker 1: they don't seem to be different. Well, parsimony, it seems
7:51
Speaker 1: different to me because that specifically is like not using resources,
7:56
Speaker 1: not spending money if you don't have to. And that's
8:00
Speaker 1: SEMs different than plurality. Okay, well then then let's explore it.
8:04
Speaker 1: So plurality adding to something, doubling something, maybe just making
8:08
Speaker 1: it more than just the singular. He's saying plurality should
8:12
Speaker 1: not be positive without necessity, right, so I guess what
8:15
Speaker 1: he's saying. Then if they are different, then if you're
8:19
Speaker 1: if you're guessing at something, if you're trying to explain something,
8:24
Speaker 1: don't make it harder than it is, don't make it
8:26
Speaker 1: bigger than is absolutely necessary to explain its sense. Or
8:31
Speaker 1: and this is a really big point that we'll see
8:33
Speaker 1: in a minute. William of Ockham really was saying, don't
8:38
Speaker 1: don't add on to something beyond what you know to
8:41
Speaker 1: be true and correct, which a lot of people over time.
8:45
Speaker 1: And I think he actually maybe explicitly wasn't empirersist have
8:49
Speaker 1: said William of Ockham wasn't empirersist. He was saying that
8:53
Speaker 1: that you need to experience things through your senses to
8:57
Speaker 1: know that they are true. Yes, empirical evidence if I
9:01
Speaker 1: can look at it or smell it, or taste it
9:03
Speaker 1: or feel it. What's the fifth one? Uh, tickle it,
9:08
Speaker 1: tickle it. And then the sixth one, of course we
9:10
Speaker 1: know means Bruce Willis is really dead. See the ghost
9:12
Speaker 1: of it. Uh. Yeah, if there's no empirical evidence, if
9:17
Speaker 1: you cannot experience it with one of your senses, then um,
9:21
Speaker 1: it's it's poo pooed. So so it is so. And
9:24
Speaker 1: those two things, like you really especially modern science, especially
9:28
Speaker 1: science these days, you put them together. It's given two things.
9:32
Speaker 1: Go with the simpler explanation, and you don't don't believe
9:36
Speaker 1: anything that you can't sense one way or another through
9:39
Speaker 1: your senses empirically. Right, you put those together, you have
9:42
Speaker 1: the basis for modern science. And so the idea that
9:46
Speaker 1: that that things that are simpler are better, or the
9:51
Speaker 1: idea that the universe is simpler, Like when you start
9:54
Speaker 1: to think about it. It's all over the place, right,
9:58
Speaker 1: Like the the idea that the you universe is based
10:00
Speaker 1: on simpler being better is found everywhere, right, So, like
10:05
Speaker 1: there's things that things have fewer parts, things that require
10:11
Speaker 1: less energy, the encapsulation of larger ideas into smaller amounts
10:16
Speaker 1: of words or theories or whatever. All these things are
10:19
Speaker 1: very much prized by humanity. So it just kind of
10:21
Speaker 1: makes sense that acams razor is a sensible thing and
10:26
Speaker 1: that you could actually use it to uncover the mysteries
10:29
Speaker 1: of the universe. But again, that's not really necessarily the case,
10:33
Speaker 1: to tell you the truth. No, I mean, there's there's
10:35
Speaker 1: gonna be a lot of uh and and this stuff
10:38
Speaker 1: is kind of fun, just a lot of back and
10:39
Speaker 1: forth on Acam's razor throughout this whole thing, because there
10:43
Speaker 1: is no idea and that's kind of part of the
10:45
Speaker 1: whole jam of Bockham's razor, because there is no right
10:48
Speaker 1: or wrong here. You know, what's weird is right? A
10:53
Speaker 1: lot of people point to it though that it's this
10:55
Speaker 1: is right. I just proved you wrong, razor and that's
10:58
Speaker 1: just not true. And all right, should we take a
11:01
Speaker 1: break early? Okay? Yeah, I think we should take a
11:04
Speaker 1: break now because I need to get my head wrapped
11:06
Speaker 1: around this, and we'll come back getting the way back
11:09
Speaker 1: machine and visit Billy Ackum. Okay, so now Billy Ackum
11:35
Speaker 1: sounds like a recording star. Oh sure, like Billy Ocean. Yeah,
11:44
Speaker 1: get also my razor and get into my car, so
11:47
Speaker 1: that we should say the razor too. It's a philosophical term.
11:50
Speaker 1: It's the term of philosophy. The razor used to scrape
11:55
Speaker 1: away unnecessary stuff. So it's Acom's razor. So let's go
11:59
Speaker 1: back and me Billy Yakum shown. Yeah. And you wrote
12:07
Speaker 1: this by the way back in your in your article
12:11
Speaker 1: righting days uh, And you point out very astutely that
12:14
Speaker 1: this is from a time in our history of the
12:16
Speaker 1: world where you might not have had a surname. You
12:19
Speaker 1: may have been William of Ockham, which is the case here,
12:23
Speaker 1: which is in England. And he lived between about twelve
12:27
Speaker 1: eighty five and thirty nine, and he was a philosophical
12:32
Speaker 1: dude and a Franciscan monk. And he very much like
12:36
Speaker 1: you point out, took his valid poverty very seriously and
12:39
Speaker 1: lived a very meager, humble life. Yeah he did. He
12:45
Speaker 1: also expected the church to take the same vow of party,
12:49
Speaker 1: and he actually butted heads with the Church quite a bit,
12:52
Speaker 1: so much so that he ended up getting excommunicated, as
12:54
Speaker 1: we'll see. But he um, he was the real deal
12:57
Speaker 1: as far as like a true believer went. The weird
13:01
Speaker 1: thing about William of Akam was that he was also
13:04
Speaker 1: a genuinely independent thinker and a rationalist, which at the
13:10
Speaker 1: time rationalism and the church did not go hand in hand.
13:15
Speaker 1: They were there was really not much rationalism. So for
13:19
Speaker 1: an idea of the idea for this this upstart Franciscan
13:23
Speaker 1: monk to start questioning the ideas of the church. And
13:26
Speaker 1: not only that, but how the the leaders of the
13:30
Speaker 1: church conducted themselves and how much money they surrounded themselves
13:32
Speaker 1: with and how much power they had politically. This is
13:35
Speaker 1: it was a big deal, all right. Yeah. And he
13:38
Speaker 1: is not He did not invent this line of thought, um,
13:41
Speaker 1: as much as he's probably attributed to this to people
13:44
Speaker 1: that uh just know him from like a jeopardy board.
13:47
Speaker 1: He h. This is already a line of thought well
13:49
Speaker 1: established by this time in the medieval times, and he
13:54
Speaker 1: was just he kind of boiled it down to those
13:57
Speaker 1: two sentences that you were talking about. So in one
14:00
Speaker 1: could understand it, he could put it on a bumper
14:02
Speaker 1: sticker and a T shirt and sell it. Right. So
14:05
Speaker 1: it was Aristotle who was the guy who came up
14:08
Speaker 1: with this idea first, that that simplicity equals perfection, and
14:12
Speaker 1: perfection equal simplicity, said, the more perfect a nature is,
14:16
Speaker 1: the fewer means it requires for its operation. Right, So
14:20
Speaker 1: that makes sense. That speak to me. But then over time,
14:22
Speaker 1: in between Aristotle and William it kind of got expanded.
14:26
Speaker 1: So let me give you an example of that same
14:28
Speaker 1: thought from Robert gross Test who was an early scientist
14:32
Speaker 1: also a theologian I believe too. Here was his his
14:36
Speaker 1: version of it, That is better and more valuable, which
14:39
Speaker 1: requires fewer other circumstances being equal, For if one thing
14:44
Speaker 1: we're demonstrated from many and another thing from fewer equally
14:47
Speaker 1: known premises, clearly that is better, which is from fewer
14:51
Speaker 1: because it makes us no quickly, just as a universal
14:54
Speaker 1: demonstration is better than particular because it produces knowledge from
14:58
Speaker 1: fewer premises. Is that similarly in natural science, in moral science,
15:03
Speaker 1: and in metaphysics, the best is that which needs no premises,
15:07
Speaker 1: and that better that which needs the fewer other circumstances
15:11
Speaker 1: being equal. Boy, the ironies there are rich, right. So
15:15
Speaker 1: within less than a hundred years, William of Ockham comes
15:19
Speaker 1: along and he's just like, plurality should not be positive
15:22
Speaker 1: without necessity Robert, and Robert was like, well, yeah, I
15:26
Speaker 1: guess that's one way you could say it. So so
15:28
Speaker 1: I want to say something though, Um, before we keep going,
15:32
Speaker 1: Chuck actually found a correction of my own article that
15:36
Speaker 1: I missed before. What's that? It turns out that they
15:39
Speaker 1: think now that a another um theologian slash scientist from
15:45
Speaker 1: uh William of Ockham's era named John Dunn Scottis was
15:50
Speaker 1: the one who really encapsulated this this principle of plurality
15:53
Speaker 1: and principle of parsimony, and that it was a guy
15:56
Speaker 1: from the nineteenth century, William Rowan Hamilton's Irish mathematician, that
16:01
Speaker 1: he was the one who misattributed it to William a. Ackam.
16:04
Speaker 1: So is William Avakam just a uh and no nothing, no, no,
16:10
Speaker 1: His writings definitely included this stuff and he never took
16:14
Speaker 1: credit for this. But they think that that it was
16:17
Speaker 1: actually um John's done scott Is who encamped who encapsulated
16:21
Speaker 1: it the way that we tend to think of it
16:23
Speaker 1: now bumper stickers, but right, But William of Akam thought
16:28
Speaker 1: this way and he was a radical thinker and a rationalist,
16:31
Speaker 1: as we'll see. Right, And like you kind of teased
16:33
Speaker 1: out earlier, he did butt heads with the church over this.
16:36
Speaker 1: He wrote a lot about it, and the church was
16:39
Speaker 1: not into it, and Pope John the what is that
16:43
Speaker 1: twenty two? Um? He they kind of squared off on this,
16:48
Speaker 1: and of course the pope wins all battles, at least
16:51
Speaker 1: back then. Uh. And he was excommunicated and several of
16:55
Speaker 1: his his monk brothers, and I take that to mean
16:59
Speaker 1: not real. There's right, we're excommunicated. In thirty eight he
17:04
Speaker 1: went to Munich seeking refuge. He was protected there by
17:08
Speaker 1: Emperor Louis the fourth, and uh, Ultimately he went out
17:14
Speaker 1: because he started writing papers about Pope John the twenty
17:18
Speaker 1: two saying he's a heretic, and people ultimately believed him. Right.
17:23
Speaker 1: He he definitely made some pretty convincing points. And he
17:26
Speaker 1: also again like if you're saying I took avour poverty,
17:29
Speaker 1: the church really should too. And the church isn't poverty
17:33
Speaker 1: stricken and you are. That gives you a little more
17:35
Speaker 1: credibility from the outside as well. So there there's some
17:39
Speaker 1: reasons why William of Bakum is this theologian, a devout
17:43
Speaker 1: Franciscan monk, is looked upon as one of the fathers
17:46
Speaker 1: of western um science like the foundation of Western science right,
17:52
Speaker 1: or science in general um. And the reason why is
17:55
Speaker 1: he argued against the prevailing ideas at the time, which
17:59
Speaker 1: is called medieval synthesis. And this is very much championed
18:02
Speaker 1: by Thomas Aquinas, who's a famous theologian. I believe he
18:06
Speaker 1: was a saint, and one of the reasons he was
18:08
Speaker 1: canonized was because of this. Thinking about this, but the
18:11
Speaker 1: whole medieval synthesis thing was that God was first and
18:16
Speaker 1: foremost everything. Right, you were, you were a member of
18:21
Speaker 1: the church, just as much as you were a member
18:24
Speaker 1: of your country, a citizen of your country. Um. All
18:27
Speaker 1: human knowledge came from God, and Thomas Aquinas he was
18:31
Speaker 1: it wasn't just like the end. Thomas Aquinas used philosophy
18:35
Speaker 1: to prove that sentiment that all human knowledge came from God,
18:38
Speaker 1: and here is how. And basically it took the idea
18:41
Speaker 1: of cause and effect and said that you can trace
18:43
Speaker 1: every effect back to a cause, back to another effect
18:47
Speaker 1: back to another cause. But ultimately you were going to
18:50
Speaker 1: end up on God, and that all of our conceptions
18:52
Speaker 1: of everything arose from God's conception, and that God will
18:56
Speaker 1: that we understand things this way, which means that this
18:59
Speaker 1: is the perfect way to understand it, which means it's
19:01
Speaker 1: right right. So that is not what William Wacam thought.
19:05
Speaker 1: He was again a rationalist who said, um, no, we
19:09
Speaker 1: tend to think things or things because that is that
19:13
Speaker 1: arises in the human mind from cognition, not from God.
19:16
Speaker 1: And this dude was not a heretic. He believed that
19:20
Speaker 1: you didn't apply rationalism to God, that God required faith,
19:25
Speaker 1: and rationalism stood on its own, it was a different thing,
19:29
Speaker 1: and you couldn't know God through your senses. God was elsewhere.
19:33
Speaker 1: Leave God out of this. And the fact that he
19:36
Speaker 1: was able to really successfully lay like a philosophical groundwork
19:39
Speaker 1: for this, a rational groundwork for it. It's one thing
19:42
Speaker 1: today to be like I'm a secular humanist. You know,
19:45
Speaker 1: I'm rational. Forget the church that's today. This is at
19:50
Speaker 1: a time when this guy is saying this and the
19:53
Speaker 1: Church has the power to burn you at the stake.
19:56
Speaker 1: Like he was. He was a stand up rational thing, right,
20:00
Speaker 1: which kind of makes him a hero of rationality today.
20:03
Speaker 1: But don't. And this is another perfect example of how
20:06
Speaker 1: Akam's razor gets confused. Akam himself gets confused too. He's
20:10
Speaker 1: a hero of science. But it was also one of
20:12
Speaker 1: the more devout human beings walking the earth at the time.
20:16
Speaker 1: It was a monk for basically his whole life, and
20:18
Speaker 1: also had a metal band called Medieval Synthesis. Oh that
20:22
Speaker 1: is a good name, isn't it. So he was he
20:24
Speaker 1: was just a conundrum. Yeah, he was a conundrum for sure.
20:27
Speaker 1: And again he got excommunicated. He had to escape by horse,
20:31
Speaker 1: stolen horse. I mean, he was not very monk like. No,
20:36
Speaker 1: But all right, So we were talking earlier about empirical evidence,
20:39
Speaker 1: um and how that kind of fits in here, and
20:42
Speaker 1: the fact that if you can't you know, like you
20:45
Speaker 1: you know the sky is blue because you look up
20:47
Speaker 1: and you see it's blue. You you know a bird
20:50
Speaker 1: makes a whistle because you can hear the bird make
20:52
Speaker 1: a whistle. So uh, it's very easy to sort of
20:57
Speaker 1: use that um and say sure, but if you don't,
21:02
Speaker 1: if you can't see it or hear it empirically or
21:04
Speaker 1: any of the senses experience it. Uh, it's very easy
21:08
Speaker 1: to poopoo. And you give a great example here, um
21:11
Speaker 1: with Lawrence and Einstein, and kind of which one would
21:15
Speaker 1: win out. So both of these guys, both physicists, UM,
21:19
Speaker 1: Einstein obviously more popular. We we'll see for a very
21:22
Speaker 1: important reason. They both had the conclusion mathematically that with
21:27
Speaker 1: the space time continuum, the closer we get to moving
21:29
Speaker 1: at the speed of light, the more we slow down,
21:32
Speaker 1: which is hard to wrap your head around. So Lawrence
21:35
Speaker 1: comes out and says, explains it away because of changes
21:38
Speaker 1: that take place in the ether, which he might as
21:41
Speaker 1: well have said, a bit of magic happens. Uh, Einstein didn't.
21:46
Speaker 1: And so the one we talked about today is Einstein
21:49
Speaker 1: and not Lawrence. That explanation of Einstein was more rooted
21:53
Speaker 1: in science, and he didn't say something wacky like the ether,
21:56
Speaker 1: which is something empirically you can't see or smell or taste.
22:00
Speaker 1: So Einstein, you know, he won that great battle. Yeah,
22:05
Speaker 1: he very famously said, he goes, I don't know what's what,
22:08
Speaker 1: but I know it ain't got nothing to do with
22:10
Speaker 1: no ether. And one day my brain's gonna end up
22:17
Speaker 1: in a jar and some guy's garage in New Jersey, right,
22:19
Speaker 1: and everybody will love that picture of me with my
22:22
Speaker 1: tongue sticking out, and Walter math that will play me
22:25
Speaker 1: in a romantic comedy. So Lawrence violated that principle of plurality, right,
22:30
Speaker 1: it added something to this that required an additional basically
22:35
Speaker 1: like a leap of faith. There was no empirical evidence
22:37
Speaker 1: that there was such a thing as the ether. And
22:39
Speaker 1: he said, did I say ether? And I didn't mean ether?
22:42
Speaker 1: And every went no, no, no, it's too lady. And
22:46
Speaker 1: he's still I mean, he's a respected he's a respected physicist. Still,
22:49
Speaker 1: it's not like he was some crackpot or anything like that,
22:51
Speaker 1: because if you put his equations in Einstein's equations side
22:54
Speaker 1: by side, they came to the same conclusions. It was
22:58
Speaker 1: just explaining how Lawrence seems to have misstepped, right, But
23:04
Speaker 1: he was obviously at least as brilliant as Einstein. When
23:06
Speaker 1: it comes to that, he's just a little nuts apparently. So,
23:09
Speaker 1: so he violates the principle of plurality. And now we
23:12
Speaker 1: understand relativity rather than Lawrence's manic ravings. Yeah, and I
23:16
Speaker 1: don't believe we mentioned there's a word for that. If
23:19
Speaker 1: you can't prove it empirically, it doesn't exist. It's called positivism. Yes,
23:23
Speaker 1: positivism isn't about having a good attitude, right, and so
23:26
Speaker 1: this is and this also happened during Einstein's working days too.
23:30
Speaker 1: There was a guy named Ernest Mock, and Ernest Mock
23:34
Speaker 1: was so Ernest Mock, thank you. That's that's way better
23:39
Speaker 1: than Ernest Ernst Mock. Um. He was so nuts on empiricism.
23:46
Speaker 1: He was. It was an early I think he was
23:48
Speaker 1: a physicist, if not a mathematician, one of the two.
23:51
Speaker 1: And he he basically said, like, molecules don't exist. All
23:56
Speaker 1: this whole bubble over molecules and atoms and all this stuff,
23:59
Speaker 1: you're all crazy. We can't see him. They don't exist.
24:02
Speaker 1: So there's a there's this kind of ironic twist that
24:05
Speaker 1: came from Einstein's working career where he actually um he
24:10
Speaker 1: beat Lorenz, his rival to this theory, through this through
24:16
Speaker 1: Ockham's razor. But he also disproved this idea of um
24:21
Speaker 1: that Earnst Mock, this thing about only believing what you
24:25
Speaker 1: can sense with your your senses, this kind of other
24:28
Speaker 1: part of Ockham's Razor, and a subsequent paper that came
24:31
Speaker 1: a few years later that showed that molecules do exist.
24:35
Speaker 1: So the idea that that ocams razor can be used
24:39
Speaker 1: both ways is something that just keeps coming up again
24:42
Speaker 1: and again and again, and we'll we'll talk about how
24:45
Speaker 1: after a break. How about that? Okay, Chuck, So who
25:13
Speaker 1: who uses occams raiser? Obviously? Um, everyone who was throwing
25:18
Speaker 1: money down on the cock fight between Laurence and Einstein,
25:21
Speaker 1: we're using atoms razor. They all went with Einstein's because
25:24
Speaker 1: this is the simplest, right, Yeah, who else uses it? Well?
25:28
Speaker 1: I mean you have a great section in this article
25:30
Speaker 1: about skeptics. Uh, and I know over the years of
25:34
Speaker 1: this show, over the past ten years, we've had a
25:35
Speaker 1: lot of um minor scraps with the skeptic community. That's
25:41
Speaker 1: a pretty minor is that fair to say? Yeah, because
25:44
Speaker 1: I mean we have our skeptical side for sure. But
25:46
Speaker 1: there you know, when it comes to skepticism and skeptics,
25:49
Speaker 1: there's ah, it's it's sort of on a on a
25:52
Speaker 1: sliding scale. There's a range of how you might feel
25:55
Speaker 1: about certain things, and you very astutely, i think, point
25:58
Speaker 1: out that if you are a true skeptic, then you
26:01
Speaker 1: will not use Akam's razor, like I did earlier, as
26:05
Speaker 1: a tool to disprove something, right that you will only
26:10
Speaker 1: use it as a tool to consider different explanations. And
26:13
Speaker 1: that's there's a big difference there. There is so like
26:17
Speaker 1: like that whole idea of seeing a ghost on film, right,
26:20
Speaker 1: So there there's there's this example where somebody could say, Um,
26:27
Speaker 1: so you just explain something about light and refracting and
26:30
Speaker 1: something with the film, and um, there was moisture in
26:34
Speaker 1: the air. What isn't it just simpler to say no,
26:37
Speaker 1: that was a ghost exactly. And in that case, UM,
26:41
Speaker 1: if you're a skeptic, you would you would Um, you're
26:44
Speaker 1: you pull a little tough of your hair out, maybe um,
26:48
Speaker 1: just start scraping at your cheeks until you bleed. Uh. Ideally,
26:52
Speaker 1: what you would say is, um, I get what you're saying,
26:56
Speaker 1: but you're bringing something into this that we don't know exists,
26:59
Speaker 1: like we do no light exists. We do know it
27:01
Speaker 1: refracts off of vapor. We do know how this can
27:04
Speaker 1: be captured on film. So yes, that sounds very complicated. Um,
27:08
Speaker 1: but the the ghosts don't exist as far as we know,
27:13
Speaker 1: We can't sense them empirically. But I would keep my
27:17
Speaker 1: mind open to the idea that ghost could consumably exists.
27:20
Speaker 1: The fact that I just showed that this is reflect
27:24
Speaker 1: the reflection of light off of water vapor in this
27:26
Speaker 1: graveyard does not mean that your hypothesis about ghosts existing
27:31
Speaker 1: is wrong. It just means that's what's in this picture. Right.
27:34
Speaker 1: That's a true skeptic, right, because because things happen, and
27:38
Speaker 1: they and later on the more fantastical explanation could be
27:44
Speaker 1: true and has been true. Uh. And you point out
27:47
Speaker 1: very uh, very plainly here that there's a couple of
27:51
Speaker 1: problems with this, And to me, this kind of says
27:53
Speaker 1: it all, is that it's subjective. Like the whole notion
27:57
Speaker 1: of determining is this is the most simple explanation is
28:01
Speaker 1: completely subjective because the ghost explanation, one person might say, no,
28:06
Speaker 1: the ghost explanation is clearly the simplest because I can
28:10
Speaker 1: just say one word ghost, see there, uh, and then
28:14
Speaker 1: you can fire right back. Well, no, I can fire
28:16
Speaker 1: back two words um, photographic mishap, right, or maybe just
28:22
Speaker 1: mishap if they want to, like keep it completely equal.
28:25
Speaker 1: And that's the most simple. So it's completely subjective as
28:28
Speaker 1: to which one or anything that it's the most simple
28:32
Speaker 1: right exactly, And then again the the idea that you
28:35
Speaker 1: can use acoms razor to disprove something just by showing
28:39
Speaker 1: that that it's not the simplest explanation. That doesn't that's
28:43
Speaker 1: not correct, that's not right, And so scientists will use
28:46
Speaker 1: acoms razor and all sorts of different disciplines um like
28:50
Speaker 1: for example, if you're making an artificial neural network, right
28:52
Speaker 1: like a learning machine, you um, you might use decision trees,
28:57
Speaker 1: and you will use some sort of simple decision tree
29:00
Speaker 1: over a more complicated one that can get the same
29:02
Speaker 1: job done. That doesn't mean that it's necessarily the right one,
29:06
Speaker 1: but they're there are demonstrably good reasons for picking a
29:11
Speaker 1: simpler one over. It's less likely to break, it takes
29:15
Speaker 1: less time, it takes less energy to come to the computations.
29:18
Speaker 1: There are things that are valuable about it, but it
29:21
Speaker 1: doesn't mean that the other one is just wrong. And again,
29:25
Speaker 1: when you're using akams razors, say, if you're making a
29:28
Speaker 1: neural network, or you're pouring through a data set or
29:31
Speaker 1: something like that, or you're trying to interpret a big
29:34
Speaker 1: data set, you're you're making again like you're saying, not
29:39
Speaker 1: just a subjective judgment about what's simpler. But that's all
29:43
Speaker 1: there is to it. You're making a subjective judgment about
29:46
Speaker 1: what's simpler, not what's right. It's not saying what's right.
29:51
Speaker 1: And this is a recurring theme that you just have
29:53
Speaker 1: to know because there's so many people out there that
29:56
Speaker 1: use acams razor to disprove other people wells ideas, and
30:01
Speaker 1: that's just not at all what it was originally intended for.
30:04
Speaker 1: It's just a complete perversion of it, and it's just
30:06
Speaker 1: wrong and that's not how science works. So if you
30:09
Speaker 1: see somebody out there doing this, um, thump them in
30:12
Speaker 1: the forehead. Yeah. And boy, then when you get into theology,
30:16
Speaker 1: it gets really interesting because this is sort of a
30:19
Speaker 1: prime example of the simplest explanation from a believer's point
30:25
Speaker 1: of view, is very easy to say, No, the Big
30:29
Speaker 1: Bang is incredibly complex and complicated, and it's pretty clear
30:34
Speaker 1: that the easiest explanation here and the simplest thing is
30:38
Speaker 1: God created life in seven days, right, But that's also
30:42
Speaker 1: discounting the process that it took God to create earth,
30:46
Speaker 1: if that's what you believe, and just kind of bundle
30:49
Speaker 1: it up in a tidy package, say God created life.
30:52
Speaker 1: The Big Bang is super complicated, so and very coincidental.
30:56
Speaker 1: Um if you really look at it. So this is
30:58
Speaker 1: the simplest x nation. Akams razor proves that God exists. Right,
31:03
Speaker 1: and so that's been used time and time again by
31:06
Speaker 1: by creationists, right, or people who believe in ghosts, or
31:10
Speaker 1: people who um counter empiricism in a lot of voice. Right. Um.
31:15
Speaker 1: But on the other hand, you can you can find
31:18
Speaker 1: atheists who use akams razor to show that God does
31:21
Speaker 1: not exist, because their point is if the universe tends
31:25
Speaker 1: towards simplicity and God is perfect and simplicity is perfection,
31:29
Speaker 1: then if God exists in the universe would be a
31:31
Speaker 1: lot more simpler. There wouldn't be this big Bang thing
31:34
Speaker 1: that we have that happened it would you You would
31:37
Speaker 1: be right creationists, and the fact that you're wrong means
31:40
Speaker 1: that means that there is no God, which is just like,
31:44
Speaker 1: my head is starting to spin a little bit with this,
31:47
Speaker 1: but it's a good example of how you can use
31:49
Speaker 1: acams razor. Both sides can use acams razor to disprove
31:52
Speaker 1: the other person's point, which against shows how it's not
31:56
Speaker 1: meant to be used that way. Well, yeah, and then
31:58
Speaker 1: you point out to and talk about a heads inner
32:00
Speaker 1: like something like photosynthesis is a pretty complex mechanism and nature. Um,
32:07
Speaker 1: but I mean, who's to say that that isn't the
32:09
Speaker 1: simplest way to achieve food production and a plant maybe
32:13
Speaker 1: that is the simplest. Yeah, we have no way of
32:16
Speaker 1: knowing that there is a simpler model of the universe
32:19
Speaker 1: or photosynthesis or of a shark or anything like that,
32:23
Speaker 1: and that even something that does seem superfluous, we can't
32:27
Speaker 1: say that in the larger scheme of things that it's
32:30
Speaker 1: actually the simplest way to do that, right, So, like
32:35
Speaker 1: like a shark seems like men, maybe do you need
32:38
Speaker 1: that extra fin or something like that, or or does
32:41
Speaker 1: a cow really need eight stomachs? Or do we really
32:44
Speaker 1: need two kidneys? But what this what this point is saying,
32:47
Speaker 1: is that there's we don't have the information to look
32:50
Speaker 1: at everything on such a grand scheme of things to
32:52
Speaker 1: say no, if they're if humans only had one kidney,
32:55
Speaker 1: this other larger system would break down and this is
32:58
Speaker 1: actually the simplest way to do it, right, Or there's
33:00
Speaker 1: a cow with one stomach that we can compare it to, right, right, exactly,
33:04
Speaker 1: So this whole thing. This is the point, Chuck, where
33:08
Speaker 1: I reach this very glaring idea that Acams Razor or
33:15
Speaker 1: what Aristotle said, that that that simplicity is is perfection.
33:21
Speaker 1: That's all man made, that's human made. That's a human
33:24
Speaker 1: made concept. To value simplicity is human made. It is
33:29
Speaker 1: possible the universe complicated. You can come up with all
33:32
Speaker 1: sorts of examples of the universe being seemingly pretty complicated.
33:36
Speaker 1: Just the universe itself seems pretty complicated, frankly, right, So
33:41
Speaker 1: that doesn't necessarily mean that the universe tends towards simplicity. Um,
33:45
Speaker 1: it seems like humans value simplicity and the universe uses
33:50
Speaker 1: simplicity a lot. But that doesn't mean that simplicity is
33:54
Speaker 1: perfection or correctness. That's a human construct. Well yeah, but
33:58
Speaker 1: and like let's say, in terms of engineering, it's probably
34:01
Speaker 1: a decent model to think, Hey, the more complex the
34:05
Speaker 1: system is that I'm engineering, the more things that are
34:08
Speaker 1: to break. So we should probably try and make it
34:10
Speaker 1: as simple as possible. That still gets the job done.
34:14
Speaker 1: But that's not to say that it can be rudimentary,
34:17
Speaker 1: like you might need it might need to be a
34:19
Speaker 1: little bit complicated to run at its most efficient, you know, yeah, exactly,
34:25
Speaker 1: or art. I mean, that's a whole different kind of worms.
34:28
Speaker 1: You know, that's entirely subjective, like is uh. You might
34:32
Speaker 1: find one drummer that says um less is more. You
34:38
Speaker 1: just need to provide that basic backbeat and leave room. Uh,
34:42
Speaker 1: And then you Stewart Copeland comes in the room and
34:45
Speaker 1: and laughs and punches you in the face because you
34:47
Speaker 1: look like sting thumps here in the head, you know.
34:50
Speaker 1: So that's that's entirely subjective when it comes to art,
34:53
Speaker 1: like you know, you've been to a museum and seen
34:55
Speaker 1: a a twelve inch by twelve inch square painted red,
35:02
Speaker 1: and then you've also seen Jackson Pollock or Free to Carlo.
35:07
Speaker 1: So again, it's just a subjective as to simplicity and
35:12
Speaker 1: maybe I don't know, can you apply to art? Am
35:14
Speaker 1: I am I wrong? There? No, not necessarily. I think
35:17
Speaker 1: that's a that's a good point because it's still it's
35:20
Speaker 1: it's subjectively valuing something, whether it's complexity or whether it's simplicity.
35:26
Speaker 1: It's it doesn't mean it's right. That's the point, right
35:29
Speaker 1: that I think that your point is one staring right
35:32
Speaker 1: over the other. Yeah, I think that's my point. And
35:35
Speaker 1: then there's also plenty of circumstances where Akham's razor just
35:38
Speaker 1: doesn't help very much, like very famously um Ptolemy's idea
35:44
Speaker 1: of the um universe. The Earth is the center of
35:48
Speaker 1: the universe. Geocentric universe, I think, is what it's called,
35:51
Speaker 1: where the Earth is the center of the universe, the Sun,
35:54
Speaker 1: the Moon, and all the planets and all the stars
35:56
Speaker 1: revolve around Earth. Is known to be wrong now, but
36:00
Speaker 1: for a long time that's what everyone thought until the
36:02
Speaker 1: Copernican Revolution, where we realized that not a universe, but
36:08
Speaker 1: our solar system is Sun centered, and the Sun is
36:11
Speaker 1: at the center and the Earth is actually moving around it. Um.
36:14
Speaker 1: The thing is is, if you look at if you
36:16
Speaker 1: look at the explanations between the two, they are pretty close,
36:22
Speaker 1: and one is not necessarily less um simple than the other.
36:30
Speaker 1: And if you put them side by side ockhams Razer,
36:32
Speaker 1: it doesn't really help. You have to dig a little
36:35
Speaker 1: deeper and figure it out that I actually know this
36:38
Speaker 1: one's right based on these observations. We think this one's right,
36:41
Speaker 1: but it has nothing necessarily to do with complexity. And
36:45
Speaker 1: then on the other side of the equation, just because
36:47
Speaker 1: something is complex doesn't mean that it's wrong. So the
36:51
Speaker 1: next time somebody starts flailing some acams razor stuff at you,
36:56
Speaker 1: you tell them I'm gonna thump you. Do you want
37:00
Speaker 1: to be thumbed? Everybody me? Yeah, Well, because they're asking
37:06
Speaker 1: for it. Is it just a pretty mild act of violence? Yeah,
37:12
Speaker 1: you don't want to be too. You don't want to
37:13
Speaker 1: punch someone in the base. No. No, And plus I
37:15
Speaker 1: mean like you shouldn't. You shouldn't thump anybody anyway. I
37:18
Speaker 1: was totally kidding it. Okay, thanks for setting me up
37:21
Speaker 1: for that. One oh one other thing. A lot of
37:23
Speaker 1: people say that um OCAM's razor squashes free thought, So
37:28
Speaker 1: I think that does kind of tie in with your
37:30
Speaker 1: art thing, you know what I mean? Like, feel free
37:32
Speaker 1: to go be complex. There's nothing wrong with it, doesn't
37:36
Speaker 1: like not everything has to be funneled through this Ockham's
37:38
Speaker 1: razor thing and made simpler just to make it better. Well, Chuck,
37:43
Speaker 1: we made it through this one sort of. It's better
37:47
Speaker 1: than Jackhammers will tell you that I think you did well.
37:50
Speaker 1: I think you did as well. Man. That means that
37:53
Speaker 1: it was a good episode. If you want to learn
37:56
Speaker 1: more about Okam's Razor. You could read my UM socio
37:59
Speaker 1: article on the site how Stuff Works dot com just
38:02
Speaker 1: typing in the search bar. And since I said so,
38:04
Speaker 1: so it's time for listener mail. All right, I'm gonna
38:07
Speaker 1: call this North Korea Part two. We heard from a woman.
38:10
Speaker 1: Uh and in Australia we were corrected. Just starts with
38:15
Speaker 1: the nest there's no awe right. Woman in Australia named
38:19
Speaker 1: Clear Sutherland too actually had an interaction and away with
38:23
Speaker 1: North Korea when she was editor at Australian newspaper called
38:29
Speaker 1: uh little M big X. It's m X, but it's
38:34
Speaker 1: just X. Oh is it? No? I don't know. They
38:38
Speaker 1: don't say awe before Australia, so oh, I got you.
38:41
Speaker 1: Probably not the little land. Well, she's based in Elbourne,
38:46
Speaker 1: UM and they have additions in Melbourne, Sydney, in Brisbane.
38:49
Speaker 1: And she says during the London Olympics in our daily
38:51
Speaker 1: Metal tally graphic we listed North in South Korea as
38:55
Speaker 1: a naughty Korea and nice Korea. Uh. Just kind of
38:59
Speaker 1: a chekey thing, I guess, she said. We've been doing
39:01
Speaker 1: this for about a week when we received a call
39:03
Speaker 1: from a Wall Street Journal reporter based in Soul seeking
39:06
Speaker 1: comment about the fact that North Korea just issued an
39:09
Speaker 1: official condemnation of our paper and its editor. At first,
39:13
Speaker 1: our assumption was we were being punked, but he directed
39:16
Speaker 1: us to the official PR website of North Korea. Sure enough,
39:21
Speaker 1: there was a flowery diet tribe and communist English which
39:26
Speaker 1: misnamed their paper Metro by the Way, and called us sortid,
39:30
Speaker 1: bullying and petty thieves, declaring we would be cursed long
39:35
Speaker 1: and Olympic history. I think my favorite extract is this,
39:38
Speaker 1: She says. Editors of the paper were so incompetent as
39:42
Speaker 1: to charnish the reputation of the paper by themselves by
39:46
Speaker 1: producing the article like that. There is a saying a
39:49
Speaker 1: straw may show which way the wind blows, a single
39:52
Speaker 1: article may exhibit the level of the paper. Wow came
39:57
Speaker 1: down on her, she says. The Wall Street Journal described
40:00
Speaker 1: the official statement is most unusual, and we ended up
40:02
Speaker 1: making some minor international headlines because of it. We ran
40:06
Speaker 1: the statement in full with a story about our sudden
40:10
Speaker 1: entry into world affairs on the front page. The headline
40:13
Speaker 1: was North Korea fires missive. At the time, we thought
40:17
Speaker 1: it was equal parts ridiculous and funny. It happened today
40:19
Speaker 1: I'd probably try and arrange new identities for me and
40:22
Speaker 1: my staff. Anyway, Thanks from me and my dog for
40:26
Speaker 1: the show. Looking forward to seeing in Melbourne. That is
40:29
Speaker 1: from Claire Sutherland. Thanks Claire, that was a great story.
40:35
Speaker 1: Well you really want this one over, don't you sure?
40:39
Speaker 1: If you want to get in touch with me and
40:40
Speaker 1: Chuck with a great story, you can tweet to us.
40:43
Speaker 1: I'm at Josh, I'm Clark, Chuck's that movie Crush. We're
40:45
Speaker 1: both at s Y s K podcast. Chuck's on Facebook
40:48
Speaker 1: dot com slash Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and we're at
40:51
Speaker 1: Facebook dot com slash stuff. You should know. You can
40:54
Speaker 1: send us an email to Stuff Podcast, how stuff Works
40:56
Speaker 1: dot com and is always joining us at at home
40:58
Speaker 1: on the web. Stuff you no dot com for more
41:06
Speaker 1: on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how
41:08
Speaker 1: stuff Works dot com? M hm hm