The Simplest Solution

 

William of Occam or Ockham was a 14^th Century philosopher and theologian. He is credited with coming up with a concept which has come to be known as “Occam’s razor.”

Simply put, Occam’s razor states that when you are trying to find an explanation to something you observe, the simplest explanation is usually the correct one. For example: you walk into a room that is supposed to have a dog and a bird in it. The dog is there, but not the bird, though pasted to the dog’s mouth are some bloody feathers. Now, you could come up with all kinds of theories about what happened to the bird. Matter displacement, some spy came in and stole the bird, you were lied to about the bird in the first place, or maybe it is the first case of an object turning invisible. But the simplest explanation (the dog ate the bird) is the most likely to be correct. Scientists and mathematicians use Occam’s razor as part of their basic guidelines (No, I am not sure where the "razor" part comes from).

I think I have developed a corollary to Occam. If you are in a disagreement with someone who is an expert in the field that includes what you are disagreeing about, you are probably wrong. I use this in my everyday work as a cartographer. Sometimes I will be mapping a survey or a subdivision plat made by a surveyor and I come upon something that does not make sense. The end point of the survey does not come out at the beginning. Or it seems to be going northeast when it should be going northwest. Something is clearly wrong. What I do not do is say, “that surveyor screwed up!” The surveyor is a licensed professional and his survey probably went through several cross-checks before he recorded it. I am jus a cartographer trying to retrace his steps. Who is more likely to be wrong? Me! It is possible that the surveyor made a mistake, but I don’t start out with that premise. I go over it again to find where I made the mistake. Only after looking at additional information (other surveys) and run it out several times with the same result, can I begin to suspect that the surveyor made an error. But nine out of ten times when I find a problem, the error is on my part, not the surveyor’s.

We can take this corollary into daily life. If I experience a blizzard and say “hmm, seems like it is getting colder.” But every climate scientist in the world says the Earth is, on average, getting warmer. I am just looking at one data point whereas they are looking at a hundred years of climate data. Plus, they are the experts! They have been trained and studied and run experiments and computer modeling. And they are ALL in agreement. So, they are the ones who are right.

It is the simplest explanation.

Star Liner