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)He was also like 62 (so retired and unconcerned about future employment prospects?), seemingly healthy, and seemingly pretty content with everything other than Boeing, so…
bayes theorem stay winning
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):
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That God created the universe
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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?I think “God did it” is a straight up simpler explanation no matter how you slice it. The problem is with the incorrect application of Occam’s razor.
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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.”
Yup. “this is how I, and everyone I have ever known use the word. Also here’s a dictionary defining it that way”
“language perspectivist much :smuglord:”
Saw someone post the dictionary definition of “anarchy” after being told that anarchists weren’t just anti-government every man for themselves types. “The dictionary says it is, so I can just ignore political theory”
A classic is when they bust out “ad hominem” after being called an idiot.
AN INSULT IS NOT WHAT AN AD HOMINEM IS YOU BUFFOONSInsult: you suck
Ad Hominem: you suck, therefore you’re wrong
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.
Thank you for this writeup. I’m gonna bookmark it and spam it at every dumbass who uses Occam’s razor from now on. Your butterfly example is a great explanation of my frustration with how the concept is used in modern day
Just want to add that people who invoke Occam’s razor almost always rely on this to conceal a normative argument in order to defend the default position.
As an example, people generally presume that capitalism is meritocratic right?
If you make an case for why this is not true a person like the one in the screenshot might start tutting and wagging their finger at you while chiding you about Occam’s razor because your argument is more “complex”, or something to that effect, and thus that it is wrong.
Don’t ever let them do that.
Just because you are refuting something which is held as truth according to conventional wisdom doesn’t mean that it has fewer assumptions. It’s just that those assumptions are generally accepted as true by the majority of people and therefore feels like those assumptions don’t count.
Yeah that’s also one of the reasons I hate seeing it invoked. It’s always done by some status quo dickhead. There’s that one and then the one about “not attributing to malice what can be explained by incompetence.” I’ve seen both invoked to defend the bombing of civilians more than once.
Agreed.
Honestly, the malice/incompetence thing is pretty okay to operate with on a personal level just like “Distrust those in whom the urge to punish is strong” is but if you’re dealing with a judge or, say, people who are seeking to prosecute former Nazi party members then they’re going to display the urge to punish strongly and it shows how insufficient it is to base your politics on an adage.
I’ve had a massive rant to a comrade some time ago about how it’s a feature not a bug that almost all of the ways that we, the unwashed masses, experience our interface with the government as being slow, inefficient, and incompetent; I believe that this is a conceit of liberal democracy in late stage capitalism - if everyone’s experience of the government is one characterised by incompetence then we struggle to even conceive of a government that is responsive and responsible, and this conceals the true nature of the governments that we live under in the west. But fail to pay your taxes or start researching and buying material to make improvised… devices, for example, you get to witness the other face of the government - one which is ruthlessly efficient and extremely capable of achieving its ends.
At some point your suspension of disbelief has to wear thin when yet-another supply of weapons from the US just so happens to end up in the hands of ISIS or yet-another MSF or Al-Jazeera building gets struck by US munitions. In the serious end of government, the wheels are greased with shit like plausible deniability, feigned incompetence, and post-facto internal investigations/admissions of culpability.
Thank you for taking the time to explain!
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.
I think they mean “assumptions” in general - like what is defined as being an “assumption” wrt Occam’s razor?
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.
CIA promotes the most convoluted conspiracy theories quite openly like everything China, Russia and especially DPRK and it sticks. It’s just the typical liberal hypocrisy and Americans being the most propagandised people on Earth in action.
North Korea has a secret army of femme fatales across the globe to seduce people and then poison them with neurotoxin they wear on a hairpin because they claimed that Kim didn’t shoot an 18 in a round of golf - obvious
Corporations who have repeatedly been shown to be willing to sacrifice human lives for profit killed somebody for profit - well now you might as well be wearing a tinfoil hat
Obligatory
It’s like when somebody trys to tell me about how the illuminati are meeting in smokey back rooms to make secret deals to fuck over the rest of the population and make deals with the devil and I’m like “they broadcast those meetings live on cnbc and release transcripts after and the idea they sold their soul to the devil is to get you to not try to hold them accountable in this life because they told you they’d be punished in the next”
Man I was reading the other one you posted when the page refreshed and I got this
Yeah the other one was made by a lib, so i just go with the classic.
Do you know where I am likely to find this army of femme fatales? You know, so I can be careful to avoid them
They’re called the “pleasure squad” and it’s just a lotta DPRK atrocity propaganda from here on out…
There is a documentary about a PHD researcher named Leonard Hofstadter who unknowingly divulged information to a North Korean spy under the false pretenses that they were dating.
“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(CW: Suicide) Even if we were to assume it was a suicide, it’d be because of the stress from having to deal with Boeing. It’s safe to say they killed him regardless of who pulled the trigger.
Have done maintenance work on Boeing aircraft before. This tracks.
Remember when Yevgeny Prigozhin was playing a friendly round of paintball with live guns and grenades onboard his private jet? That explanation definitely requires fewer assumptions than an assassination.
Well, in addition to Occam’s razor, I think the right analytical heuristic for examining the Prigozhin situation is to remember that the funniest thing that could possibly happen is what’s going to happen.
Occram’s razor tells me he was murdered. OP is just a lib suffering from cognitive dissonance.
Seriously thentwo options are:
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This person who clearly had the motive means and opportunity to report illegal things at Boeing knowing it would risk his employment got the chance to do that but instead killed himself halfway through doing that without any indication of why.
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The giant corporation killed somebody who threatened their profits.
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Occam’s razor literally says that it was murder though. It would have to be more complex and weird otherwise
Yeah, we have documentaries about how tobacco and big oil do shit like this. Steven Donziger had his whole fight with a private court putting him in house arrest for years. It’s kinda weird that Boeing would do it, but not beyond the pale. Big business just loves to assassinate is Occam’s razor.
Occam’s razor is when someone decides to shoot themselves in their stomach and their head (if you get the reference you get the reference)
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.
Very cool “War Takes”. Defense contrator Boeing thanks you for your service
Occam’s razor for this event is very obviously that he was murdered though?
Like, that’s literally the first thought 99% of people have had. It is the most obvious explanation. If you’re applying Occam’s Razor here then you’re surely supporting that position.
The thing about Occam’s razor is that what seems to be the simplest explanation depends entirely on how you subjectively frame the issue in question. If you think of it as “a guy killed himself” vs “a powerful and widespread conspiracy of Boeing and the cops conspired to kill him, make it look like a suicide, and covered up all evidence” then the suicide option seems “simpler”
But if you frame it correctly as “a whistleblower who was about to testify against a billion dollar company decided that right then would be a great time to suddenly and without warning commit suicide” vs “he got got” the latter is clearly simpler.
Simplicity is not really an objective measure of anything.
Ah yes, these things are always for crazy people to believe, except when US enemies are concerned, then it’s totally not a conspiracy.
Funny that
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 think its the other way around. The simplest explanation is immediately discarded by liberal media because most of the time it’s the truth and it reveals the material reality.
Recent examples:
who blew up the nordstream pipeline? certainly not the US that explicitly said they would destroy it if russia ever did something against ukraine and had a material benefit destroying it, must’ve been the russians themselves to make the US look bad even though it was against their material interests!
how did hamas pull the october 7 operation? certainly these savages couldn’t pull it off, israel is invincible! they must’ve purposefully let it happen to finally get rid of palestinians!
liberals increasingly engage in these mental acrobatics to justify their crumbling worldview full of contradictions.
Yeah “Boeing whistleblower killed in retaliation” is a pretty simple reality, shit happens to whistleblowers all the time and it’s not irrational to assume that as a null hypothesis until proven wrong. It’s like assuming that the IOF is lying when they say something.
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.
