Skip Navigation
76 comments

  • totally rational that an outspoken critic would kill themself before completing their deposition

    • I know that if I'd dedicated my retirement to doing a thing, then I'd kill myself right as the thing was finally seeming to be gotten done

  • As usual, Facts and Logic types don't understand their own worshiped ideas. Occam's razor states that the idea with the least number of additional assumptions is most likely correct. Not "the simple explanation is always right." as these people assert. And people are fucking awful at figuring out what "assumptions" even are in this context.

    • Also even if it was about "the simplest", it's NOT THE SIMPLEST EXPLANATION.
      "Boeing killed a guy" - Boeing has already killed several guys (albeit by accident).
      "Guy killed himself" - The guy had never before killed himself (as evidenced by him being alive until then)

    • Thank. You.

      Also note that it's not an inviolable law. It doesn't actually prove any particular position. It's just a principle to guide your thinking and nothing more.

      Say your car breaks down. The idea that it's a mechanical failure is more Occam-friendly than the idea that your car was sabotaged which then caused the mechanical failure which caused your car to break down.

      Note that as we add in that additional assumption, we reduce the likelihood of the second idea being true compared to the first idea. That's just a function of adding assumptions. You could add an assumption that a person who had been threatening you was the person who sabotaged your car and it becomes less likely again, all things being equal.

      All that this illustrates is that the more specific something is, the less generally applicable it is. Astonishing, right?

      One of my favourite ways to really stump these dorks is by asking them which assertion is true according to Occam's razor (itself false due to my point above and putting it in these terms is a low-key flex because a person who knows what they're talking about would object to the framing of the assertion but that forever seems to be lost on these fools):

      • That God created the universe
      • The sum total of all of astrophysics, with every single claim therein, is how the universe was created

      Obviously the simplest argument is always inherently the truest and most accurate argument every time, right?

      You can drag the conversation down into the weeds by defending the first argument since it still makes fewer claims even when you add in extra points like the fact that god has always existed and is all powerful etc.; there's basically no way of arguing that the explanation that astrophysics provides us for how the universe was created is simpler than the argument that God did it.

      Of course this type of person is most likely to be an atheist edgelord, or at least a reformed edgelord, so this sort of argument is very likely to rile them up. And of course you can cut through this argument by stating that the number of assumptions that astrophysics makes is fewer but, again, that requires the other person to know what they're talking about.

      • No, thank you, you put it far better than I did. I thought about bringing up the God argument (as I think that was one of the guy's original points with this idea) but forgot. Like any logic tool, someone trying to use this argument to "win" a debate has already lost, the use of these sorts of tools is always to examine and refine your own arguments and own understanding of something, not to "win debates" with a gotcha.

      • Hey I'm not super strong on rhetorics and I'm kinda curious about the flaw in your argument. Would you mind explaining what the issue with your "god made the earth, or all of astrophysics did" supposition is?
        Is it just that there's a lot of hidden assumptions in the god bit and a lot of proven assumptions in the astrophysics bit?

    • My least favorite thing about these :smuglord: types is their constant misuse of language. I honestly don't really mind busting out the ol logical falicies and shit but for the love of god use it correctly.

      • And when you confront them on their misuse of a word they just say some bullshit like "umm acktually the definitions of words change over time, so it's really your fault for sticking to a standard definition of the word instead of using mine."

      • A classic is when they bust out "ad hominem" after being called an idiot.
        AN INSULT IS NOT WHAT AN AD HOMINEM IS YOU BUFFOONS

    • I am open and honestly interested in finding out more. I'm reading about Occam for the first time.

      Would you like to say a little more about what assumptions are in this context? Sources on Occam that explain the idea sufficiently well would also be good.

      Thanks in advance!

      • I'm afraid I don't have anything on hand, so here's a brief bit of stuff from memory (so it could be quite wrong), "William of Occam" was a 13th century monk who was interested in the sciences and came up with this idea. So it is a very simple pre-modern idea of eliminating unnecessary "fluff" when trying to determine something. At the time there wasn't a properly developed scientific method, so this idea could be considered a sort of proto-scientific method, an attempt to examine things and then understand them, instead of having a conclusion and working backwards to support it.

        Occam's razor is usually used as a kind of lazy intellectual shorthand to justify an idea because it is straightforward, though they will usually use the term "simple" when they mean "straightforward." but an idea being "simple" isn't the same thing as an idea with fewer underlying assumptions.

        For a basic thought experiment, consider a very simple idea: A butterfly is on a flower.

        The "simplest" idea of anything would be that it just is because it is. The butterfly is on the flower because that's where the butterfly is. But this isn't an explanation of anything. It is "simple" but saying "the thing is they way it is because it is." isn't actually a satisfying explanation to anyone.

        We could assert that the butterfly is on the flower because Google's stock price just increased, but this is an additional assumption, as it would assume the butterfly has knowledge of the stock market and that knowledge influences its decision to sit on flowers somehow. This explanation is a explanation, but it makes some very big assumptions about how butterflies operate.

        So the key to understanding this sort of logic is to collate the information we know about the situation. In this case, it would be what we know about butterflies. If we know that butterflies drink nectar, we have an explanation that fits occam's razor well. The butterfly is hungry, that's why it is on the flower. No additional mechanisms required to explain the behaviour, no extra assumptions.

        Of course, this explanation still requires us to understand something about butterflies, so occam's razor as a tool is only really useful in situations where we already understand a decent amount already, and is really only useful for eliminating really over the top explanations. It's more of a starting point of an investigation, never an end point, and never a debatebro trump card "haha I play occam's razor, which means I win the debate!" thing that the internet has turned it into.

        Sorry for the ramble. TLDR: Made up by a guy like 700 years ago and not super relevant today, except in very broad strokes.

      • Basically what Egon said below.

        The assumptions being made about him killing himself are vast. First you have to assume he had some serious mental health crisis without evidence, or that some other dark secret was about to be revealed about him, or any number of other assumptions without evidence as to why he might have been motivated to take his own life.

        Therefore the least amount of assumptions one could make was the obvious: He was murdered to silence him while he was a key witness against a multi-billion dollar corporation trying to get out of being held responsible for the deaths of other people they already killed.

      • An assumption would be a supposition that something, which isn't directly proven by the known facts, happened and led to the event you're trying to explain. Example: fire starts outside your house in drought season. Possible explanation #1: someone threw a glass bottle which caused a fire to start in the dry grass. Explanation #2: Your neighbor had a grudge against you and doused the grass with gasoline to do arson.

        The first explanation makes one assumption: we don't know if someone did litter or not, it's not an unreasonable thing to guess but it's also not directly related to the facts we already know. The second explanation makes several assumptions: That our neighbor had a grudge, that said grudge drove them to use gasoline specifically to douse the grass and burn it. These things may be true, but none of the facts relevant to the situation directly prove either of the assumptions.

    • Exactly. What he said was: 'pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate', “plurality should not be posited without necessity.”

      Sometimes, there's pretty damn obvious necessity.

    • I was thinking the same thing.

      The wild "TAKE" here is that person's interpretation of how to apply Occam's Razor.

  • "Welp gentlemen this has been a productive day, we have almost finished my life's work. Time to go shoot my brains out in a motel parking lot, making all the work be worthless. Good evening"

    I am begging smug redditor debatelords to please just fucking once actually THINK. This is terminal "both-sides" brain

    • No the rational and simple answer is to believe that a multi-billion dollar company that doesn't give a shit about safety standards would ever deign to do a thing that has happened so often before. The rational and simple answer is that a man who has dedicated his retirement to this very thing would kill himself with a gun in a truck in a watched parking lot on the third day of depositions.

  • Occam's razor says the Russians killed him with the Havana syndrome raygun because he was going to post a picture of Xi Jinping as Winnie the Pooh

  • I mean, i dunno. I was indirectly related to a Boeing project manager for a while - and let me tell you - I could very easily believe that someone at Boeing just having that much of a stick up their ass about the whole situation is one of the simpler explanations here.

  • As opposed to anybody critical of Putin dying. That's always a conspiracy/assassination because duh obviously. Occam's razor means the things I'm conditioned to believe are more simple and likely to be true, dumb dumb

  • I believe Boeing, as a long standing military industrial complex major player, used their dog (the Federal Government) to whack the guy

    Can't prove it, but that's what I believe

  • All the "razors" are bullshit imo. As far as I'm aware there's no actual evidence that any of them are true. They're just a bunch of pithy sayings that people have repeated endlessly until they acquired a weight of authority to them.

    And now people take them as gospel and use them to avoid actually examining anything. The worst is redditors who can barely spark two neurons together, they'll toss one of these out and suddenly they've got the high ground, no thought required. After all, the razors are a universal 'fact'.

    • I also hate it when "razors" show up in online discourse. Especially Occam's.

      The actual purpose of the razor is to offer part of an explanation for rationality, based on things you already believe. So 1) Occam's Razor is actually different depending on each individual, as different people believe different things, and 2) it makes no claims to the actual truthiness of statements, only whether it's rational to believe given your understanding of the world.

      Whether statements are rational to believe and whether they're true are completely different things, so the razor is useless in every setting I've ever seen it applied in online.

      Even if we throw this all away and grant that Occam's Razor is legit in the way it's most commonly presented ("the simplest explanation is the best one"), we still have a massive problem. What the hell is the "simplest" explanation? People love throwing this maxim out in argument, but never justify why their explanation is actually the simplest.

      Determining the simplicity of an explanation is remarkably complex.

      • rationality is when you start ignoring if things are true or false and instead defer to some bullshit rule someone pulled out their ass. Amazing. These people are cultists.

76 comments