Saturday, June 14, 2014

Mistaken Support for Simplicity

It is an unfortunate twist that Occam's Razor is used to mistakenly promote simplicity.

Many people have twisted Occam's Razor from the notion that answers with the fewest assumptions are likely (but not guaranteed) to be the most accurate to the idea that the simplest answer is the best, and incorrect warping of the actual idea. What this error does is give support to those who do not understand (or don't want to understand) complexity when they promote a simple idea instead. This is a prominent problem in politics and religion, but not restricted to those areas. It's certainly easier to hold something simple to be true, but it also allows those who eschew complexity to find comfort in ideas that take no work to adopt.

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