Wielding Occam’s Razor

There are lot’s of concepts that one hears about, sees thrown around on social media, etc which, when you look at it closely, you realise that most people that use it are just trying to sound smart and don’t really understand what they are talking about.

When it gets a certain amount of eyes on it, our brains mistake frequency for accuracy and  the misinterpretation races around the world, making everyone slightly stupider in the process.

A good example of this is Occam’s razor.

It’s common use, almost reaching the point of idiom, is in meaning that, when presented with a problem, the simplest solution is often the best.

Not only is this not the original meaning of the concept, but it’s also bullshit.

As an example -  to explain the complexity and scale of the Universe, the diversity of life on Earth, the simplest answer is an all powerful deity created it all. Clearly as they would’ve been fucking bored sitting by themselves in the great vaccuum of nothingness before existence and needed various playthings with which to seek entertainment.

The impulse to explain, seeking the simplest answer, has led us astray for millennia.

So, for years and all around the world, humans everywhere are doing stupid, lazy shit and making huge errors of judgement as they are following a maxim that nearly everyone has got completely wrong.

The bigger problem is, they think they are being smart.

William of Occam (or Ockham, depending on which online source you Google to check how to spell it) was some old English dude, who spoke in Latin, feared a fire and brimstone afterlife and had nothing to do all day but think and write. He may not have even come up with the concept, but like many things in history, gets the credit and that’s all that matters.

The real razor translates (apparently, I can’t speak Latin, it might say Occam has the best burgers this side of Kent) as “Entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily”, or “Plurality must never be posited without necessity." 

Practically, when presented with competing hypotheses about the same event or phenomenon, select the one that MAKES THE FEWEST ASSUMPTIONS.

Now, this COULD be the simplest one, but not always.

Often, the simplest one is the one that invents a magical cause (see my reference to all powerful deities above……. Oh calm down, if you are reading my blog and think that i’m going to leave religion alone then I will save you a lot of time and heartbreak and tell you to stop now, it will only get worse from here).

The misapplication of the razor has left humans cutting themselves shaving for ages, all the while thinking they are being “Sciencey”.

First up, even the correct razor is a model. It’s not a rule of the universe. It’s a heuristic, a “fast and frugal” shortcut to save time and get to work.

It’s not a rigorous scientific trial, double-blinded and controlled for bias.

So from that loose starting point, it gets tweaked, and we have a bastardised version of the principle in place of the real thing. The reason for this, ironically, is that the wrong razor, the simple answer is the best approach, IS SIMPLER than the real razor, which involves having to think which hypothesis has made the least amount of assumptions.

Delicious, no?

But wait, the irony gets thicker.

We assume those 2 things are the SAME, and so go with the simpler process and in so doing, cut ourselves with Occam’s razor.

Being quick and easy, the simple razor cuts faster and so off we go all the way around the world and through time.

Now why am I banging on about this, other than to implicitly try and show that I am smarter than most of the known universe?

It happens ALL THE TIME in healthcare, medicine, physio, pain, fitness and “wellness” - whatever the fuck that means.

I woke up with a sore neck - it was your pillow

I hurt my back lifting - it was your position when you lifted

Your bad back is your bad genes

Your chronic headache is because you’re an ovulating female

Your gut problems are gluten

Your knee pain is your flat feet

Your fatigue is a lack of magnesium

You will lose weight with more cardio

It’s osteoarthritis, you need a joint replacement

All of these aren’t fragments of my information, they are explanations given to people, by other health professionals, that I have seen, not necessarily for the same issue, which all follow the simple, wrong razor and are, simply, wrong.

Some of them are just limited, in that they could be true but no one knows. Some of them are just bullshit.

Multiple psychological phenomena are at play at once here.

A combination of selection and confirmation bias.

Overconfidence.

The Dunning-Kruger effect.

Plus some patriarchal medicine-centric health system power dynamics.

Humans are pattern recognition machines, and a lot of health care, particularly diagnostics, involves pattern recognition - clumping symptoms together into recognisable groups.

And many things happen very often, so it is very easy for our brains to run with “oh, yeah, I’ve seen this before, i get great results with this” and be completely wrong.

Part of the deal as a health professional is to better understand the limits of our knowledge and our ability to recognise when we can be wrong.

As it is always the person with the problem that cops the downside when we are.

We aren’t talking “oh, fuck it, I put too much yeast in the bread” or “goddammit Steve, I needed that report on my desk Tuesday”.

We are talking “shit, sorry, you have a stress fracture. I thought it was your tight hip flexors.”

(Whatever the fuck THAT means!!)

Most health professionals don’t even hear about when they are wrong, as the person often gets dismayed and looks elsewhere, or gives up. Or fucking dies.

Taking shortcuts is an evolutionary necessity. If we had to process the details of every decision we make we would starve to death. Or if we analysed every potential danger before running we would’ve been eaten.

And while we are now much fancier, with not only robots that can mow your lawn, but the time and capacity (at least for some of you fucking weirdos) to have conversations about the quality, colour and thickness of said lawn, our hardware is still the same as when we were working out which berries were good and which ones put Keith in the ground.

Poor Keithy.

Of all the fancy adornments of modern life, like handbag dogs, arse implants and three-quarter pants, it is the sheer volume of information that is my specific target for this week’s verbal tirade.

(the blog on arse implants will be in the next series)

Another trick of our hardware is when we see or hear the same thing many times, the frequency with which we are exposed to it increases the importance we place on it.

So something that is complete bullshit is moved from the “wacky af” column to the “surely not” column, to the “there’s something in this” column to the “i knew it!! They’re stealin’ our jobs!!!” column. Through mere repetition. But we THINK it’s because it’s fact.

This is conspiracy theories, bullshit explanations for pain and injury, ways to train, what to eat, how to raise genius kids and most of the strongly held, full of shit opinions that abound. A quick scroll through instagram reveals how pervasive misinformation is. It’s like a drug our brains can’t get enough of, and more and more addicts pop up every day.

At the same time accurate, sensible and helpful information gets drowned out by sheer frequency and noise, and so, seems like it must be wrong.

This winner takes all situation increases exponentially.

Which is the real issue of getting the wrong end of the razor.

By having the razor commit Seppuku, we are fanning the flames of Scientism - things that sound and seem like real science but are actually very flaky.

So, even with philosophical models of thinking, we still need to apply them accurately.

Using Occam’s razor to slice off extraneous hypotheses is a useful tool, but only when used to remove the hypotheses that make UNFOUNDED ASSUMPTIONS.

It may take a little more time and a little more grey matter, but seriously sheeple, not that much more. It’s still fairly quick and fairly easy to look at competing hypotheses, the premises they are built on, and just think - how do we know this?

A reliable and efficient bullshit detector is one of the most useful tools you can develop, and when used in conjunction with the correct Occam’s razor, would render you a pretty lethal logical weapon.