252 Sentences With "Occam's razor" | Random Sentence Generator

Think of it as Occam's Razor applied to Italian food.

Occam's razor is hardly a fundamental law of the universe, however.

The other prevailing theory about Maeve's daughter goes the Occam's Razor route.

And in the galactic center, pulsars are "the Occam's razor candidate," said Slatyer.

"Occam's razor suggests the simpler explanation of a pissed-off insider," he wrote.

As with most things Trump-related, Occam's razor has always pointed to incompetence.

But as far as the 2016 results go, Occam's razor is the better explanation.

You probably know Occam's Razor, where the simplest explanation is usually the best one?

It can be a frustratingly reductive vision, an Occam's razor theory of world peace.

Occam's razor says this isn't displaced anger about an economy that's actually doing pretty well.

Occam's razor suggests there's no grand plan — no 300-year purpose — and there shouldn't be.

But as Occam's razor taught us, the most simple solution is usually the correct one.

Focusing on eating patterns is a way of approaching the problem that violates Occam's razor.

It's a sort of corruption Occam's razor: never assume sophistication when crude thuggery is sufficient.

"Occam's Razor," Ford responds, referring to the theory that the simplest explanation is always the best.

Now, Occam's razor would have us believe this was merely a recall error on Lochte's part.

Our Occam's-razor brains are always searching for the simplest story line to explain disparate data.

So if a woman comes forward about being assaulted, Occam's razor suggests she's probably telling the truth.

In times of economic crisis, it pays to follow Occam's Razor, just go with the simplest solution.

So if a woman comes forward about being raped, Occam's razor suggests she's probably telling the truth.

It's like a genetic Occam's Razor, with the thinking that the simplest explanation is often the right one.

But Occam's razor suggests the simplest explanation is the most likely; weak trade growth reflects weak economic growth.

But honestly, I'm more inclined to invoke Occam's razor: The most logical explanation is usually the right one.

He and many like him won't accept the Occam's razor explanation that the Democrats backed the wrong candidate.

This is a great example of the use of Occam's razor: the simplest explanation is usually the correct one.

J.C. Charli XCX has turned out to be the Occam's razor of pop: a sloganeer and strategist, ruthlessly terse.

In other words, Occam's Razor is that somehow the call was spam somehow routed over a building-wide comms system.

Between 80 and 89 percent of respondents said the material samples could not be explained by chemtrails using Occam's razor.

Put together all the clues, and Occam's Razor comes to mind: The most obvious scenario is the most likely scenario.

Apply Occam's razor: if someone brags this much, bending every ray of light back to himself, what's the simplest explanation?

By Occam's razor, alien engineering needs to be a simpler explanation than a natural explanation before it starts to seem plausible.

Occam's razor suggested that the obvious explanation was the right one: Saddam had WMD and was refusing to give them up.

And you never know whether it will be the simple, obvious answer, like Occam's razor, or something that requires lateral thinking.

I'm going to do the thing that non-scientists always do when they want to sound scientific and invoke Occam's razor.

Now, I'm of the Occam's Razor belief when it comes to Marvel movies: The easiest explanation is almost always what will happen.

With this much established, Occam's razor is now on the side of those who posit direct-collusion theories rather than indirect ones.

Of course, this Occam's razor approach to the Gawker case would not lend itself as easily to a public relations mastermind's skills.

Occam's razor would suggest the guidance of Suki Hobson, the team's director of strength and conditioning who also oversaw Parker's first ACL comeback.

Occam's razor slipped, right by the jugular vein, costing the lives of more than 100,000 Iraqi civilians and more than 4,000 American troops.

Well, here's the Occam's Razor explanation: Nothing Russia could do, on its own, would help its foreign policy more than what Trump is proposing.

With simplicity I don't mean Occam's razor, which demands that among two theories that achieve the same thing, you pick the one that's simpler.

Well, here's the Occam's razor explanation: Nothing Russia could do, on its own, would help its foreign policy more than what Trump is proposing.

But for now, I've got to go with Occam's razor: The simplest explanation for Washington's success is that Wall is some kind of superhuman.

The last two years often seem like a concerted effort to disprove "Occam's Razor," the theory that the simplest explanation is usually the right one.

Occam's Razor — the principle that the obvious conclusion is most often correct — suggests that notwithstanding the name and the hashtag, many of them are angling for #NeverTrumpOrCruz.

But if Occam's razor is any guide, the truth about these adorable Australian twins is probably a wee bit less miraculous than the internet would have you believe.

The first—Occam's razor in the Trump administration—is that sheer incompetence and a lack of familiarity with the levers of government are causing a lot of confusion.

Byron York, however, offers today what is arguably the Occam's razor theory of Obamacare repeal, the simplest explanation of why Republicans haven't overturned President Obama's health care law.

So, barring the possibility that something was lost in translation, Occam's Razor seems to be that the Playstation end of the equation is where Spielberg's fuzzy memory comes in.

Occam's razor suggests his strategy is intended to avoid a blowout defeat in New York's presidential primary on Tuesday, which would probably constitute a fatal blow to his candidacy.

Some, so much so that whenever there was a need to take the equivalent of Occam's razor to the declining college budget, the geography department was enthusiastically offered for sacrifice.

Considering the limitations of our knowledge, methods, and resources, our field may have had no choice but to submit to the lacerations of Occam's razor, at least for a while.

This is actually the explanation that's suggested by Occam's razor because — as Foer himself acknowledges in his story — the server was originally registered by an email marketing firm called Cendyn.

One principle of OCCAM's razor held that when one is confronted with a set of assumptions, one should always go with the simplest (also known as the theory of parsimony).

Time and time again, in these latter seasons of "Game of Thrones," the old Occam's razor proposition comes into play: The simplest explanation is the most likely to be correct.

If this happens, those anxious about Khashoggi's fate will probably be left with little more than circumstantial evidence and Occam's razor: Khashoggi went to the Saudi consulate and never came out.

There's no proof of any foul play on Coindash's part, however, and Occam's Razor may favour Coindash's own explanation: A hacker simply took advantage of the weakest security link in the ICO.

"I think what's going on right now is an Occam's razor scenario," he told Insider, referring to the philosophical theory that the simplest explanation for an event is often the correct one.

Big Tech's problems are indeed dizzying and manifold, but the last few years have taught us that there's an Occam's razor quality to any explanation of the toxicity of our online platforms.

This never made any real sense—the Neapolitan Novels would be a world-historical achievement in the male exploration of women's interior lives; Occam's Razor says the books were written by a woman instead.

I am a huge believer in Occam's razor, which says you cannot make progress in science without beginning with the simplest possible hypothesis, and you only reject that simple hypothesis because you have no choice.

Occam's razor suggests that Hillary was in the dark, like she always was with Bill's sexual misconduct, and was merely doing political wife duties in thanking a dedicated campaign volunteer, oblivious to the broader context.

That's when Trump, who makes a habit of repurposing neo-Nazi propaganda for messaging on social media, began his march to the Republican Party's presidential nomination, and Occam's razor finally sliced through the more strained explanations.

These strategies were divide-and-conquer (generate multiple theories, each of which fits only a part of the data), Occam's razor (use the simplest possible theory), unification (combine the theories) and "lifelong learning" (try applying the theories to future problems).

In the Wild West of bitcoin, Occam's Razor isn't always a reliable rule of thumb, but the weight of it nonetheless clearly rests on one possibility here: someone is likely having some very mean fun with some very desperate people.

There are plenty of logical reasons to go around to explain the last three days of trading but the most compelling, for me anyway, is Occam's Razor: It simply became time for the pressure building up in the stock markets to be released.

Bannon likens his exit from the Trump White House in 2017 to Henry V's ouster of Falstaff in Orson Welles's "Chimes at Midnight" — regarding Falstaff's banishment as an affirmation of the "natural order of things," and not, as Occam's razor might suggest, a betrayal.

It seems like a reach to read that as Trump claiming a victory for the national anthem and traditional values over the left-wing afro-wearing protest guy, if only because the Occam's Razor answer for Trump is always to assume that he's talking about Trump.

Many of these deals are aiming to replace doctors with elaborate artificial intelligences, chatbots, and even robots to address the need for new physicians, but University Ventures and Tiber Health are taking Occam's razor to the problem by backing a company that uses technology to better train more doctors.

So, you know, applying Occam's Razor to this problem, it seems like it's much more likely that you would expect to see this targeted tracking based on other things that you're doing online, as opposed to the microphone listening to you translating that to text and being interpreted.

Occam's Razor is that he simply spent most of the "here's what we know about the aliens terraforming our planet to have a poisonous atmosphere" session fantasizing about what either the aliens or analysts or both look like naked, thus depriving him of the information needed to reach a conclusion.

We find out via conference call that Phillip and Whitehorse, finally making a grand reappearance that was teased at the end of season one, are in cahoots, with Phillip using Angela as part of his Occam's razor influenced plan and Whitehorse frustrated that their plan isn't working on the time scheduled he'd like.

I also don't identify with the lonely Mensa genius troubles, so, Occam's razor, I work on the assumption that like 98 percent of the population, I have an average IQ. With that tight math in mind, I figure the smart thing—the averagely intelligent thing anyway—is to read about the lives of people whose IQs are in the range of most people.

But given what we know about Trump's personality, what's in the public record, and what's been leaked by forces with reasons to despise him, Occam's razor still suggests that shadiness is all we'll find, and that Trump is lashing out childishly not out of guilt but because that's simply what he does — whether the target is Ted Cruz's family or Judge Curiel, the Khan family or now Comey.

Because it's still hard to see Michael Dell voluntarily rejoining the land of "circus clowns," we've got to entertain some alternative possibilities: Michael Dell transitions into a non-CEO role, perhaps to be succeeded by VMWare's Pat Gelsinger; New asset sales/public floats to pay down debt; or Some sort of private transaction, perhaps with the help of a deep pocket like SoftBank (which has really become the Occam's Razor of tech financing).

President TrumpDonald John TrumpStates slashed 2628,28503 environmental agency jobs in past decade: study Biden hammers Trump over video of world leaders mocking him Iran building hidden arsenal of short-range ballistic missiles in Iraq: report MORE again has wielded Occam's Razor to the national interest with his elegant instruction to the Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism to consider the designation of drug cartels — currently transnational criminal organizations (TCOs) — as foreign terrorist organisations (FTOs) in accordance with Section 22019 of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 and the statutory criteria defined in that act and the Foreign Relations Authorization Act.

Similarly Occam's razor can be applied so only one personal agent is required.

Tegmark has been criticized as misunderstanding the nature and application of Occam's razor; Massimo Pigliucci reminds that "Occam's razor is just a useful heuristic, it should never be used as the final arbiter to decide which theory is to be favored".

Schelling also supports this view.Schelling, Vol. 2, p. 288. Occam's razor certainly appears to cut their way.

Subsequently, Smart has been severely criticized for his use (or misuse) of Occam's razor and ultimately retracted his advocacy of it in this context. Paul Churchland (1984) states that by itself Occam's razor is inconclusive regarding duality. In a similar way, Dale Jacquette (1994) stated that Occam's razor has been used in attempts to justify eliminativism and reductionism in the philosophy of mind. Eliminativism is the thesis that the ontology of folk psychology including such entities as "pain", "joy", "desire", "fear", etc.

Glassen argued that, because it is not a physical entity, Occam's razor cannot consistently be appealed to by a physicalist or materialist as a justification of mental states or events, such as the belief that dualism is false. The idea is that Occam's razor may not be as "unrestricted" as it is normally described (applying to all qualitative postulates, even abstract ones) but instead concrete (only applies to physical objects). If one applies Occam's Razor unrestrictedly, then it recommends monism until pluralism either receives more support or is disproved. If one applies Occam's Razor only concretely, then it may not be used on abstract concepts (this route, however, has serious consequences for selecting between hypotheses about the abstract).

It has been suggested that Occam's razor is a widely accepted example of extraevidential consideration, even though it is entirely a metaphysical assumption. There is little empirical evidence that the world is actually simple or that simple accounts are more likely to be true than complex ones. Most of the time, Occam's razor is a conservative tool, cutting out "crazy, complicated constructions" and assuring "that hypotheses are grounded in the science of the day", thus yielding "normal" science: models of explanation and prediction. There are, however, notable exceptions where Occam's razor turns a conservative scientist into a reluctant revolutionary.

In Foundations of Computer Science, 1990. Proceedings., 31st Annual Symposium on (pp. 382-391). IEEE. function learningNatarajan, B. K. (1993, August). Occam's razor for functions.

They would have different data sets and possibly different descriptive languages. Nevertheless, science advanced as Occam's razor was an informal guide in deciding which model was best. With the advent of formal languages and computer programming Occam's razor was mathematically defined. Models of a given set of observations, encoded as bits of data, could be created in the form of computer programs that output that data.

One justification of Occam's razor is a direct result of basic probability theory. By definition, all assumptions introduce possibilities for error; if an assumption does not improve the accuracy of a theory, its only effect is to increase the probability that the overall theory is wrong. There have also been other attempts to derive Occam's razor from probability theory, including notable attempts made by Harold Jeffreys and E. T. Jaynes. The probabilistic (Bayesian) basis for Occam's razor is elaborated by David J. C. MacKay in chapter 28 of his book Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms, where he emphasizes that a prior bias in favour of simpler models is not required.

Hence, Aquinas acknowledges the principle that today is known as Occam's razor, but prefers causal explanations to other simple explanations (cf. also Correlation does not imply causation).

Selecting the minimum length description of the available data as the best model observes the principle identified as Occam's razor. Prior to the advent of computer programming, generating such descriptions was the intellectual labor of scientific theorists. It was far less formal than it has become in the computer age. If two scientists had a theoretic disagreement, they rarely could formally apply Occam's razor to choose between their theories.

William of Ockham (c. 1288 – c. 1348) was an English Franciscan friar and scholastic philosopher. He is perhaps most well known for his principle of parsimony, famously known as Occam's razor.

N. Soklakov. Occam's razor as a formal basis for a physical theory from arxiv.org – Foundations of Physics Letters, 2002 – SpringerM Hutter. On the existence and convergence of computable universal priors arxiv.

Woodley, M. A., McCormick, C. A., & Naish, D. 2012. Response to Bousfield & LeBlond: Shooting pipefish in a barrel; or sauropterygian "mega-serpents" and Occam's razor. Journal of Scientific Exploration 26, 151–154.

Ross Quinlan invented the Iterative Dichotomiser 3 (ID3) algorithm which is used to generate decision trees. ID3 follows the principle of Occam's razor in attempting to create the smallest decision tree possible.

Induction: From Kolmogorov and Solomonoff to De Finetti and Back to Kolmogorov – Metroeconomica, 2004 – Wiley Online Library.D Stork. Foundations of Occam's razor and parsimony in learning from ricoh.com – NIPS 2001 Workshop, 2001A.

If the latter interpretation is accepted, the validity of Occam's razor as a tool could possibly be accepted if the simpler hypotheses led to correct conclusions more often than not. Possible explanations can become needlessly complex. It might be coherent, for instance, to add the involvement of leprechauns to any explanation, but Occam's razor would prevent such additions unless they were necessary. Some increases in complexity are sometimes necessary, so there remains a justified general bias toward the simpler of two competing explanations.

Since the distribution with the maximum entropy is the one that makes the fewest assumptions about the true distribution of data, the principle of maximum entropy can be seen as an application of Occam's razor.

Walter Chatton (c. 1290–1343) was an English Scholastic theologian and philosopher who regularly sparred philosophically with William of Ockham, who is well known for Occam's razor. Chatton proposed an "anti-razor". From his Lectura I d.

On a separate note, Conall Towe also criticizes Yaniv Roznai's conceptual framework in regards to primary constituent power and secondary constituent power for violating Occam's Razor, which states that the simplest explanations possible for various phenomena should be preferred. Professor Oran Doyle has also previously criticized Yaniv Roznai's conception of the people as primary constituent power and the people as secondary constituent power as separate entities for violating Occam's Razor--with Doyle arguing that constituent power should be best thought of as a capacity rather than as an entity.

Berkeley was an idealist who believed that all of reality could be explained in terms of the mind alone. He invoked Occam's razor against materialism, stating that matter was not required by his metaphysic and was thus eliminable. One potential problem with this belief is that it's possible, given Berkeley's position, to find solipsism itself more in line with the razor than a God-mediated world beyond a single thinker. Occam's razor may also be recognized in the apocryphal story about an exchange between Pierre- Simon Laplace and Napoleon.

Thus the traditional NP analysis requires less of the theoretical apparatus, since it does not need all those null determiners, the existence of which is non-falsifiable. Other things being equal, less is better according to Occam's Razor.

However, he also reacted to and against Scotus in the areas of predestination, penance, his understanding of universals, his formal distinction (that is, "as applied to created things"), and his view of parsimony which became known as Occam's Razor.

This belief is computed from the length of the program: longer programs are considered less likely, in line with Occam's razor. AIXI then selects the action that has the highest expected total reward in the weighted sum of all these programs.

"The explanation used by Marks and Kammann clearly involves the use of Occam's razor. Marks and Kammann argued that the 'cues' – clues to the order in which sites had been visited—provided sufficient information for the results, without any recourse to extrasensory perception. Indeed Marks himself was able to achieve 100 percent accuracy in allocating some transcripts to sites without visiting any of the sites himself, purely on the ground basis of the cues. From Occam's razor, it follows that if a straightforward natural explanation exists, there is no need for the spectacular paranormal explanation: Targ and Puthoff's claims are not justified".

Furthermore, just as the later-proposed minimum description length principle in algorithmic information theory (AIT), a.k.a. the theory of Kolmogorov complexity, it can be seen as a formalization of Occam's Razor, according to which the simplest interpretation of data is the best one.

In chemistry, Occam's razor is often an important heuristic when developing a model of a reaction mechanism.RA Jackson, Mechanism: An Introduction to the Study of Organic Reactions, Clarendon, Oxford, 1972.Carpenter, B. K. (1984). Determination of Organic Reaction Mechanism, New York: Wiley-Interscience.

Occam's razor is not an embargo against the positing of any kind of entity, or a recommendation of the simplest theory come what may. Occam's razor is used to adjudicate between theories that have already passed "theoretical scrutiny" tests and are equally well-supported by evidence. Furthermore, it may be used to prioritize empirical testing between two equally plausible but unequally testable hypotheses; thereby minimizing costs and wastes while increasing chances of falsification of the simpler-to- test hypothesis. Another contentious aspect of the razor is that a theory can become more complex in terms of its structure (or syntax), while its ontology (or semantics) becomes simpler, or vice versa.

This philosophical razor advocates that when presented with competing hypotheses about the same prediction, one should select the solution with the fewest assumptions, and that this is not meant to be a way of choosing between hypotheses that make different predictions. Similarly, in science, Occam's razor is used as an abductive heuristic in the development of theoretical models rather than as a rigorous arbiter between candidate models.Hugh G. Gauch, Scientific Method in Practice, Cambridge University Press, 2003, , . In the scientific method, Occam's razor is not considered an irrefutable principle of logic or a scientific result; the preference for simplicity in the scientific method is based on the falsifiability criterion.

Since mental noise is a sufficient explanation that is much simpler and more straightforward than any other explanation involving heuristics, behavior, or social interaction, the Occam's razor principle argues in its favor as the underlying generative mechanism (it is the hypothesis which makes the fewest assumptions).

This, again, reflects the mathematical relationship between key concepts in Bayesian inference (namely marginal probability, conditional probability, and posterior probability). The bias–variance tradeoff is a framework that incorporates the Occam's razor principle in its balance between overfitting (i.e. variance minimization) and underfitting (i.e. bias minimization).

The theory is based in philosophical foundations, and was founded by Ray Solomonoff around 1960.Samuel Rathmanner and Marcus Hutter. A philosophical treatise of universal induction. Entropy, 13(6):1076–1136, 2011 It is a mathematically formalized combination of Occam's razor and the Principle of Multiple Explanations.

This theory is a mathematical formalization of Occam's razor.Induction: From Kolmogorov and Solomonoff to De Finetti and Back to Kolmogorov JJ McCall – Metroeconomica, 2004 – Wiley Online Library. Another technical approach to Occam's razor is ontological parsimony. Parsimony means spareness and is also referred to as the Rule of Simplicity.

Marcus Hutter's universal artificial intelligence builds upon Solomonoff's mathematical formalization of the razor to calculate the expected value of an action. There are various papers in scholarly journals deriving formal versions of Occam's razor from probability theory, applying it in statistical inference, and using it to come up with criteria for penalizing complexity in statistical inference. PapersChris S. Wallace and David M. Boulton; Computer Journal, Volume 11, Issue 2, 1968 Page(s):185–194, "An information measure for classification."Chris S. Wallace and David L. Dowe; Computer Journal, Volume 42, Issue 4, Sep 1999 Page(s):270–283, "Minimum Message Length and Kolmogorov Complexity." have suggested a connection between Occam's razor and Kolmogorov complexity.

481 In some uses, the label "simplicity" can imply beauty, purity, or clarity. In other cases, the term may suggest a lack of nuance or complexity relative to what is required. The concept of simplicity is related to the field of epistemology and philosophy of science (e.g., in Occam's razor).

Physicists have no interest in using Occam's razor to say the other two are wrong. Likewise, there is no demand for simplicity principles to arbitrate between wave and matrix formulations of quantum mechanics. Science often does not demand arbitration or selection criteria between models that make the same testable predictions.

Foundations of Occam's razor and parsimony in learning from ricoh.com D Stork – NIPS 2001 Workshop, 2001Occam's razor as a formal basis for a physical theory from arxiv.org AN Soklakov – Foundations of Physics Letters, 2002 – SpringerBeyond the Turing Test from uclm.es J HERNANDEZ-ORALLO – Journal of Logic, Language, and …, 2000 – dsi.uclm.

"Risky Business" is the fourth episode of the eighth season of the American television medical drama series House and the 159th overall episode of the series. It aired on Fox on October 31, 2011. This episode was watched by 6.65 million viewers, the lowest since episode 3 in season 1, "Occam's Razor".

The track "Occam's Razor" is a guitar solo extract from a live version of the song "Inca Roads". The solo was used in the song "On the Bus" from the album Joe's Garage (1979). This is an example of Zappa's xenochrony technique. Tracks 3 and 9 feature the Abnuceals Emuukha Electric Symphony Orchestra.

Overfitting is the use of models or procedures that violate Occam's razor, for example by including more adjustable parameters than are ultimately optimal, or by using a more complicated approach than is ultimately optimal. For an example where there are too many adjustable parameters, consider a dataset where training data for can be adequately predicted by a linear function of two independent variables. Such a function requires only three parameters (the intercept and two slopes). Replacing this simple function with a new, more complex quadratic function, or with a new, more complex linear function on more than two independent variables, carries a risk: Occam's razor implies that any given complex function is a priori less probable than any given simple function.

William of Ockham (circa 1287–1347) was an English Franciscan friar and theologian, an influential medieval philosopher and a nominalist. His popular fame as a great logician rests chiefly on the maxim attributed to him and known as Occam's razor. The term razor refers to distinguishing between two hypotheses either by "shaving away" unnecessary assumptions or cutting apart two similar conclusions. While it has been claimed that Occam's razor is not found in any of William's writings, one can cite statements such as William of Ockham – Wikiquote ("Plurality must never be posited without necessity"), which occurs in his theological work on the Sentences of Peter Lombard (Quaestiones et decisiones in quattuor libros Sententiarum Petri Lombardi; ed. Lugd., 1495, i, dist.

Then the language may be encoded so that the most commonly used sentences are the shortest. This internal language implicitly represents probabilities of statements. Occam's razor says the "simplest theory, consistent with the data is most likely to be correct". The "simplest theory" is interpreted as the representation of the theory written in this internal language.

Abductive validation is the process of validating a given hypothesis through abductive reasoning. This can also be called reasoning through successive approximation. Under this principle, an explanation is valid if it is the best possible explanation of a set of known data. The best possible explanation is often defined in terms of simplicity and elegance (see Occam's razor).

Lorentz and FitzGerald offered within the framework of Lorentz ether theory a more elegant solution to how the motion of an absolute aether could be undetectable (length contraction), but if their equations were correct, the new special theory of relativity (1905) could generate the same mathematics without referring to an aether at all. Aether fell to Occam's Razor.

However, minimality (or parsimony) is not the only logical virtue. A common misapprehension of Occam's razor has it that the simpler theory is always the best. In fact, the principle is that the simpler of two theories of equal explanatory power is to be preferred. In other words: additional "entities" can pay their way with enhanced explanatory power.

By generalization, the other material suggesting the presence of extraterrestrial entities from elsewhere is hypothesized to be explainable by similar means. The observed presence of surreal dream-like activity and imagery or themes based in the cultural environment and historically understood sources reinforces the proposition that the extraterrestrial hypothesis is unnecessary and, by Occam's razor, probably incorrect.

If one considers such statements to be illegitimate, e.g. by applying Occam's Razor, then such "tricks" are not considered demonstrations of underdetermination. This concept also applies to scientific theories: for example, it is similarly trivial to find situations that a theory does not address. For example, classical mechanics did not distinguish between non-accelerating reference frames.

The concept of simplicity has been related to in the field of epistemology and philosophy of science. According to Occam's razor, all other things being equal, the simplest theory is most likely true. In other words, simplicity is a meta-scientific criterion by which scientists evaluate competing theories. A distinction is often made by many persons.

A study of the predictive validity of Occam's razor found 32 published papers that included 97 comparisons of economic forecasts from simple and complex forecasting methods. None of the papers provided a balance of evidence that complexity of method improved forecast accuracy. In the 25 papers with quantitative comparisons, complexity increased forecast errors by an average of 27 percent.

While evolution is not an inherently parsimonious process, centuries of scientific experience lend support to the aforementioned principle of parsimony (Occam's razor). Namely, the supposition of a simpler, more parsimonious chain of events is preferable to the supposition of a more complicated, less parsimonious chain of events. Hence, parsimony (sensu lato) is typically sought in constructing phylogenetic trees, and in scientific explanation generally.

An object is known by the application of senses. The properties of an object are inferred by learning and reasoning based on the information perceived. Abstractly, an object is a construction of our mind consistent with the information provided by our senses, using Occam's razor. In common usage an object is the material inside the boundary of an object, in 3-dimensional space.

The primary use of the information approach to probability is to provide estimates of the complexity of statements. Recall that Occam's razor states that "All things being equal, the simplest theory is the most likely to be correct". In order to apply this rule, first there needs to be a definition of what "simplest" means. Information theory defines simplest to mean having the shortest encoding.

Some controversial early theories, for example Spaceship Moon Theory and Shklovsky's "Hollow Phobos" hypothesis have suggested that moons were not formed naturally at all. These theories tend to fail Occam's razor. While artificial satellites are now a common occurrence in the Solar System, the largest, the International Space Station is 108.5 metres at its widest, is tiny compared to the several kilometres of the smallest natural satellites.

He also worked for many television series such as National Velvet (1960), The Outer Limits ("The Human Factor", 1963), and Daniel Boone (1964-70). His science fiction novels include Dark Dominion (1954), Beyond Eden (1955), and Occam's Razor (1957). He also wrote six novels outside the genre. Duncan wrote the mini-sequel Time Machine: The Journey Back to George Pal's 1960 movie The Time Machine.

22 June 2008 . Naturally, some gaps in knowledge, and even some observations that contradict a theory, must be temporarily tolerated while research continues. To temper ad hoc hypothesizing in science, common practice includes falsificationism (somewhat in the philosophy of Occam's razor). Falsificationism means scientists become more likely to reject a theory as it becomes increasingly burdened by ignored contradicting observations, and by ad hoc hypotheses.

Russell did not think we should have separate methods for philosophy. Russell thought philosophers should strive to answer the most general of propositions about the world and this would help eliminate confusions. In particular, he wanted to end what he saw as the excesses of metaphysics. Russell adopted William of Ockham's principle against multiplying unnecessary entities, Occam's razor, as a central part of the method of analysis.

On the surface Many-minds arguably violates Occam's Razor; proponents counter that in fact these solutions minimize entities by simplifying the rules that would be required to describe the universe. Nothing within quantum theory itself requires each possibility within a wave function to complement a mental state. As all physical states (i.e. brain states) are quantum states, their associated mental states should be also.

An alternative was presented by William of Ockham, following the manner of the earlier Franciscan John Duns Scotus, who insisted that the world of reason and the world of faith had to be kept apart. Ockham introduced the principle of parsimony – or Occam's razor – whereby a simple theory is preferred to a more complex one, and speculation on unobservable phenomena is avoided.Grant, p. 142; Nicholas, p. 134.

Dulling Occams Razor is the only EP by the American extreme metal band Found Dead Hanging before changing their name to Architect. It was released along with Bare As Bones by Backstabbers Incorporated and Deadwater Drowning by Deadwater Drowning as the inaugural releases of Black Market Activities on July 15, 2003. In philosophy, Occam's Razor is the meta-theoretical principle that the simplest solution is usually the correct one.

In cases, when the argument of normal conditions comes too often, according to the principle of Occam's Razor another explanation X' has to be found. In natural science normal conditions term is often used as a less strict substitute for standard conditions. The latter term supposes strict definition of environment parameters, and mentioning the standard, under which "standard conditions" are defined. In technical American English it is often abbreviated as "NC".

Occam Learning is named after Occam's razor, which is a principle stating that, given all other things being equal, a shorter explanation for observed data should be favored over a lengthier explanation. The theory of Occam learning is a formal and mathematical justification for this principle. It was first shown by Blumer, et al. that Occam learning implies PAC learning, which is the standard model of learning in computational learning theory.

The major criticism of theistic evolution by non- theistic evolutionists focuses on its essential belief in a supernatural creator. These critics argue that by the application of Occam's razor, sufficient explanation of the phenomena of evolution is provided by natural processes (in particular, natural selection), and the intervention or direction of a supernatural entity is not required.Krauss, Lawrence M. (2012) A Universe from Nothing Free Press, New York. p.146 f.

The general principle of science is that theories (or models) of natural law must be consistent with repeatable experimental observations. This ultimate arbiter (selection criterion) rests upon the axioms mentioned above. There are examples where Occam's razor would have favored the wrong theory given the available data. Simplicity principles are useful philosophical preferences for choosing a more likely theory from among several possibilities that are all consistent with available data.

Biologists or philosophers of biology use Occam's razor in either of two contexts both in evolutionary biology: the units of selection controversy and systematics. George C. Williams in his book Adaptation and Natural Selection (1966) argues that the best way to explain altruism among animals is based on low-level (i.e., individual) selection as opposed to high-level group selection. Altruism is defined by some evolutionary biologists (e.g.

For a book-length treatment of cladistic parsimony, see Elliott Sober's Reconstructing the Past: Parsimony, Evolution, and Inference (1988). For a discussion of both uses of Occam's razor in biology, see Sober's article "Let's Razor Ockham's Razor" (1990). Other methods for inferring evolutionary relationships use parsimony in a more traditional way. Likelihood methods for phylogeny use parsimony as they do for all likelihood tests, with hypotheses requiring few differing parameters (i.e.

The festival was held adjacent to USC's campus at the Village Gate Theatre, which only sat 75 people at maximum capacity. Fracas! II (2005) The second annual festival took place April 15 and 16, 2005, also at the Village Gate Theatre. Ten troupes performed at the festival including Occam's Razor from The University of Chicago. Of the remaining nine troupes, four were from the University of Southern California.

The generation of networks required two phases. In the first phase, the researchers devised a number of phylogenies, called candidate trees, to be tested for compatibility. A character is compatible when its origin is explained by the phylogeny generated.. In a perfect phylogeny, all the characters are compatible and the compatibility of the tree is 100%. By the principle of parsimony, or Occam's razor, no networks are warranted.

Ockham defended the principle of parsimony, which could already be seen in the works of his mentor Duns Scotus. His principle later became known as Occam's Razor and states that if there are various equally valid explanations for a fact, then the simplest one should be chosen. This became a foundation of what would come to be known as the scientific method and one of the pillars of reductionism in science.

There are many alternative explanations for the accelerating universe. Some examples are quintessence, a proposed form of dark energy with a non-constant state equation, whose density decreases with time. A negative mass cosmology does not assume that the mass density of the universe is positive (as is done in supernova observations), and instead finds a negative cosmological constant. Occam's razor also suggests that this is the 'more parsimonious hypothesis'.

His book Spiritualism and Sir Oliver Lodge (1917) was an exposure of trance mediumship and a criticism of the spiritualist views of Oliver Lodge. In the book he criticized Lodge for ignoring Occam's razor and invoking miracles. In his book Spirit Experiences (1919), Mercier claimed to have converted to spiritualism and apologized for his previous book. He claimed that after investigating the subject he had personally experienced communications with the dead, levitation and telepathy.

Critiques such as those based on the distinction between theory and fact are often leveled against unifying concepts within scientific disciplines. Principles such as uniformitarianism, Occam's razor or parsimony, and the Copernican principle are claimed to be the result of a bias within science toward philosophical naturalism, which is equated by many creationists with atheism.; ; ; . Peters and Hewlett argue that the atheism of many evolutionary supporters must be removed from the debate.

It can be argued that the criterion hard to vary is closely related to Occam's razor: both imply logical consistency and a minimum of assumptions. The philosopher Karl Popper acknowledged it is logically possible to avoid falsification of a hypothesis by changing details to avoid any criticism, adopting the term an immunizing stratagem from Hans Albert.Ray S. Percival (2012), The Myth of the Closed Mind: Explaining why and how People are Rational, p.206, Chicago.

These ideas lead to the following particular formulation of Occam's razor: 'Other things being equal, if T1 is more ontologically parsimonious than T2 then it is rational to prefer T1 to T2.' While a common formulation stipulates only that entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity, this version by contrast, states that entities should not be multiplied other things being equal, and this is compatible with parsimony being a comparatively weak theoretical virtue.

Occam's razor could then formally select the shortest program, measured in bits of this algorithmic information, as the best model. To avoid confusion, note that there is nothing in the MDL principle that implies a machine produced the program embodying the model. It can be entirely the product of humans. The MDL principle applies regardless of whether the description to be run on a computer is the product of humans, machines or any combination thereof.

Frozen Evolution is a popular science book which aims to explain current developments in evolutionary biology to a wide audience. It also contains information boxes which clarify important topics in science like peer review, scientific journals, citation metrics, philosophy of science, paradigm shifts, and Occam's razor. Flegr's previous research in toxoplasmosis is also mentioned. The book also discusses Flegr's model of frozen plasticity, a hypothesis that describes a possible mechanism for the origin of adaptive traits.

S. Stich and T. Warfield, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 85-101. Another possible resolution is akin to parallelism—Eugene Mills holds that behavioral events are causally overdetermined, and can be explained by either physical or mental causes alone. An overdetermined event is fully accounted for by multiple causes at once. However, J. J. C. Smart and Paul Churchland have argued that if physical phenomena fully determine behavioral events, then by Occam's razor a non- physical mind is unnecessary.

Combining the two within the same company - e.g. for two different segments - would stretch the company's resources. Nevertheless, academics as well as practitioners use various segmentation principles and models in their attempt to bring some sort of structure. The goal for every industrial market segmentation scheme is to identify the most importantly significant differences among current and potential customers that will influence their purchase decisions or buying behavior, while keeping the scheme as simple as possible (Occam's Razor).

Around 1960, Ray Solomonoff founded the theory of universal inductive inference, a theory of prediction based on observations, for example, predicting the next symbol based upon a given series of symbols. This is a formal inductive framework that combines algorithmic information theory with the Bayesian framework. Universal inductive inference is based on solid philosophical foundations, and can be considered as a mathematically formalized Occam's razor. Fundamental ingredients of the theory are the concepts of algorithmic probability and Kolmogorov complexity.

Rather than argue for the necessity of a god, some theists base their belief upon grounds independent of, or prior to, reason, making Occam's razor irrelevant. This was the stance of Søren Kierkegaard, who viewed belief in God as a leap of faith that sometimes directly opposed reason.McDonald 2005. This is also the doctrine of Gordon Clark's presuppositional apologetics, with the exception that Clark never thought the leap of faith was contrary to reason (see also Fideism).

For example, in the Kolmogorov–Chaitin minimum description length approach, the subject must pick a Turing machine whose operations describe the basic operations believed to represent "simplicity" by the subject. However, one could always choose a Turing machine with a simple operation that happened to construct one's entire theory and would hence score highly under the razor. This has led to two opposing camps: one that believes Occam's razor is objective, and one that believes it is subjective.

Model selection is the task of selecting a statistical model from a set of candidate models, given data. In the simplest cases, a pre-existing set of data is considered. However, the task can also involve the design of experiments such that the data collected is well-suited to the problem of model selection. Given candidate models of similar predictive or explanatory power, the simplest model is most likely to be the best choice (Occam's razor).

Frozen Evolution is a 2008 book written by parasitologist Jaroslav Flegr, which aims to explain modern developments in evolutionary biology. It also contains information boxes which clarify important topics in science like peer review, scientific journals, citation metrics, philosophy of science, paradigm shifts, and Occam's razor. Flegr's previous research in toxoplasmosis is also mentioned. The book also discusses Flegr's model of "frozen plasticity," a hypothesis which describes a possible mechanism for the evolution of adaptive traits.

The concept, named after journalist, author, and avowed atheist Christopher Hitchens, echoes Occam's razor. The dictum appears in Hitchens's 2007 book titled God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything. It takes a stronger stance than the Sagan standard ("Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence"), instead applying to even non-extraordinary claims. It has been compared to the Latin proverb quod grātīs asseritur, grātīs negātur ("What is asserted gratuitously may be denied gratuitously"), which was commonly used in the 19th century.

However, this does not mean the mind spends energy and, despite that, it still doesn't exclude the supernatural. Another reply is akin to parallelism—Mills holds that behavioral events are causally overdetermined, and can be explained by either physical or mental causes alone. An overdetermined event is fully accounted for by multiple causes at once. However, J. J. C. Smart and Paul Churchland have pointed out that if physical phenomena fully determine behavioral events, then by Occam's razor an unphysical mind is unnecessary.

Also, criteria such as these do not necessarily decide between alternative theories. Quoting Bird: It also is debatable whether existing scientific theories satisfy all these criteria, which may represent goals not yet achieved. For example, explanatory power over all existing observations (criterion 3) is satisfied by no one theory at the moment. The desiderata of a "good" theory have been debated for centuries, going back perhaps even earlier than Occam's razor, which often is taken as an attribute of a good theory.

In this case, as it turned out, neither the wave—nor the particle—explanation alone suffices, as light behaves like waves and like particles. Three axioms presupposed by the scientific method are realism (the existence of objective reality), the existence of natural laws, and the constancy of natural law. Rather than depend on provability of these axioms, science depends on the fact that they have not been objectively falsified. Occam's razor and parsimony support, but do not prove, these axioms of science.

Manuscript illustration of William of Ockham Occam's razor, Ockham's razor, Ocham's razor () or law of parsimony () is the problem-solving principle that "entities should not be multiplied without necessity."Who sharpened Occam’s Razor? The idea is attributed to English Franciscan friar William of Ockham ( 1287–1347), a scholastic philosopher and theologian who used a preference for simplicity to defend the idea of divine miracles. It is variously paraphrased by statements like "the simplest explanation is most likely the right one".

Put another way, any new, and even more complex, theory can still possibly be true. For example, if an individual makes supernatural claims that leprechauns were responsible for breaking a vase, the simpler explanation would be that he is mistaken, but ongoing ad hoc justifications (e.g. "... and that's not me on the film; they tampered with that, too") successfully prevent outright disproval. This endless supply of elaborate competing explanations, called saving hypotheses, cannot be ruled out – except by using Occam's razor.

The difference is one of focus and degree. Non-Brisk analysis tends to formulate "conceptual" definitions only when necessary, while for Briskers, these definitions are the first and most common tool to be used when approaching a Talmudic issue. One example of Rabbi Chaim's emphasis on the value of precise definition can be found in quote: "One approach which answers three different problems is better than three different approaches to individually solve the three problems" (a corollary of Occam's razor).

Without further assumptions, this problem cannot be solved exactly as unknown situations may not be predictable. The inductive bias of the learning algorithm is the set of assumptions that the learner uses to predict outputs given inputs that it has not encountered. It may bias the learner towards the correct solution, the incorrect, or be correct some of the time. A classical example of an inductive bias is Occam's Razor, which assumes that the simplest consistent hypothesis is the best.

Monotype executive Dan Rhatigan described the theory as implausible in 2011: "I'll admit that I tend to side with the more fully documented (both in general, and in agreement with what little I can find within Monotype to support it) notion that Times New Roman was based on Plantin...I won't rule out the possibility that Starling Burgess drew up the concept first, but Occam's razor makes me doubt it." The Times Online web site credits the design to "Stanley Morrison, Victor Lardent and perhaps Starling Burgess".

The difference is one of focus and degree. Non-Brisk analysis tends to formulate "conceptual" definitions only when necessary, while for Briskers, these definitions are the first and most common tool to be used when approaching a Talmudic issue. One example of the emphasis on the value of precise definition can be found in a quote attributed to Chaim Soloveitchik: "One approach which answers three different problems is better than three different approaches to individually solve the three problems" (a corollary of Occam's razor).

Chemist Peter Atkins said that the point of Russell's teapot is that there is no burden on anyone to disprove assertions. Occam's razor suggests that the simpler theory with fewer assertions (e.g., a universe with no supernatural beings) should be the starting point in the discussion rather than the more complex theory. Responding to the invocation of Russell's "Celestial Teapot" by Richard Dawkins as evidence against religion, an apologia by philosopher Paul Chamberlain contends that such arguments rely on an undue distinction between positive and negative claims.

Without any additional assumptions, this problem cannot be solved since unseen situations might have an arbitrary output value. The kind of necessary assumptions about the nature of the target function are subsumed in the phrase inductive bias. A classical example of an inductive bias is Occam's razor, assuming that the simplest consistent hypothesis about the target function is actually the best. Here consistent means that the hypothesis of the learner yields correct outputs for all of the examples that have been given to the algorithm.

A phylogenetic analysis constructs thousands of family trees, each of which include hundreds of "steps" in evolution where analyzed traits are evolved, lost, or reacquired. The family tree with the fewest "steps", known as the most parsimonious tree (MPT), is generally considered to be the most accurate under the principle of Occam's razor. In the case of this analysis, the MPT considered Colobops to be a basal rhynchosaur. However, some family trees look completely different from the MPT despite only a being few evolutionary steps more complex.

Some people might think that the strong feelings we have when we see or consider a murder provide evidence of murder's wrongness. But it is not difficult to explain these feelings without saying that wrongness was their cause. Thus there is no way of discerning which, if any, ethical properties exist; by Occam's razor, the simplest assumption is that none do. The non-cognitivist then asserts that, since a proposition about an ethical property would have no referent, ethical statements must be something else.

In the philosophy of religion, Occam's razor is sometimes applied to the existence of God. William of Ockham himself was a Christian. He believed in God, and in the authority of Scripture; he writes that "nothing ought to be posited without a reason given, unless it is self-evident (literally, known through itself) or known by experience or proved by the authority of Sacred Scripture." Ockham believed that an explanation has no sufficient basis in reality when it does not harmonize with reason, experience, or the Bible.

Generally, the exact Occam factor is intractable, but approximations such as Akaike information criterion, Bayesian information criterion, Variational Bayesian methods, false discovery rate, and Laplace's method are used. Many artificial intelligence researchers are now employing such techniques, for instance through work on Occam Learning or more generally on the Free energy principle. Statistical versions of Occam's razor have a more rigorous formulation than what philosophical discussions produce. In particular, they must have a specific definition of the term simplicity, and that definition can vary.

Occam's razor has gained strong empirical support in helping to converge on better theories (see "Applications" section below for some examples). In the related concept of overfitting, excessively complex models are affected by statistical noise (a problem also known as the bias-variance trade-off), whereas simpler models may capture the underlying structure better and may thus have better predictive performance. It is, however, often difficult to deduce which part of the data is noise (cf. model selection, test set, minimum description length, Bayesian inference, etc.).

In science, Occam's razor is used as a heuristic to guide scientists in developing theoretical models rather than as an arbiter between published models. In physics, parsimony was an important heuristic in Albert Einstein's formulation of special relativity,L. Nash, The Nature of the Natural Sciences, Boston: Little, Brown (1963). in the development and application of the principle of least action by Pierre Louis Maupertuis and Leonhard Euler, and in the development of quantum mechanics by Max Planck, Werner Heisenberg and Louis de Broglie.

It is worth noting here a subtle difference between the maximum- parsimony criterion and the ME criterion: while maximum-parsimony is based on an abductive heuristic, i.e., the plausibility of the simplest evolutionary hypothesis of taxa with respect to the more complex ones, the ME criterion is based on Kidd and Sgaramella-Zonta's conjectures that were proven true 22 years later by Rzhetsky and Nei. These mathematical results set the ME criterion free from the Occam's razor principle and confer it a solid theoretical and quantitative basis.

ECREE is related to Occam's razor in the sense that according to such a heuristic, simpler explanations are preferred to more complicated ones. Only in situations where extraordinary evidence exists would an extraordinary claim be the simplest explanation. A routinized form of this appears in hypothesis testing where the hypothesis that there is no evidence for the proposed phenomenon, what is known as the "null hypothesis", is preferred. The formal argument involves assigning a stronger Bayesian prior to the acceptance of the null hypothesis as opposed to its rejection.

Yet, works proposing the putative influence of the planetary forces on the sun (including its imaginary movement around the barycenter) keep appearing every now and then , though without a quantitative physical mechanism for that. However, the solar variability is known to be essentially stochastic and unpredictable beyond one solar cycle, which contradicts the idea of the deterministic planetary influence on solar dynamo. Moreover, modern dynamo models precisely reproduce the solar cycle without any planetary influence Accordingly, the planetary influence on the solar dynamo is considered marginal and contradicting the Occam's razor principles.

Sagan presents a set of tools for skeptical thinking which he calls the "baloney detection kit". Skeptical thinking consists both of constructing a reasoned argument and recognizing a fallacious or fraudulent one. In order to identify a fallacious argument, Sagan suggests employing such tools as independent confirmation of facts, debate, development of different hypotheses, quantification, the use of Occam's razor, and the possibility of falsification. Sagan's "baloney detection kit" also provides tools for detecting "the most common fallacies of logic and rhetoric", such as argument from authority and statistics of small numbers.

After seeing 'Vesuvius,' one of the theories certainly has a lot more weight now," Kuchman wrote. "Sure, maybe Ted’s speech in 'The Time Travelers' and the ending of 'Vesuvius' have nothing to do with each other, but is that really the most likely case? ... I originally nixed both 'The Mother is dead' and 'Ted is dead' theories, citing Occam's razor. The simplest explanation is often the correct explanation, and back then that was the case. If I’m sticking to Occam’s Razor still, it's now a lot harder to debunk 'The Mother is dead' theory.

The n-universes are a conceptual tool introduced by philosopher Paul Franceschi. They consist of simplified models of universes which are reduced to their essential components, in order to facilitate the associated reasoning. In the study of thought experiments related to paradoxes and philosophical problems, the situations are generally complex and likely to give birth to multiple variations. Making use of Occam's razor, modeling in the n-universes makes it possible to reduce such situations to their essential elements and to limit accordingly the complexity of the relevant study.

If the entire set can be accounted for by descent from the proto-language, which must contain the proto-forms of them all, the tree, or phylogeny, is regarded as a complete explanation and by Occam's razor, is given credibility. More recently such a tree has been termed "perfect" and the characters labelled "compatible". No trees but the smallest branches are ever found to be perfect, in part because languages also evolve through horizontal transfer with their neighbours. Typically, credibility is given to the hypotheses of highest compatibility.

Parsimony, known colloquially as "Occam's razor", refers to the principle of selecting the simplest of competing hypotheses. In the context of ancestral reconstruction, parsimony endeavours to find the distribution of ancestral states within a given tree which minimizes the total number of character state changes that would be necessary to explain the states observed at the tips of the tree. This method of maximum parsimony is one of the earliest formalized algorithms for reconstructing ancestral states, as well as one of the simplest. Maximum parsimony can be implemented by one of several algorithms.

Communism had as one of its principles atheism. Americans divided over the issues of Communism and atheism, but with the Great Purge, Cultural Revolution and 1956 Hungarian Uprising, many became concerned about the implications of Communism and atheism. At the same time, the scientific community was making great strides in developing the theory of evolution, which seemed to make belief in God unreasonable under Occam's razor. The American shock and panic about the 1957 Sputnik launch led to the passage of the National Defense Education Act in 1958 to reform American science curricula.

The principle is akin to Occam's razor, which states that—all else being equal—the simplest hypothesis that explains the data should be selected. Some of the basic ideas behind maximum parsimony were presented by James S. Farris in 1970 and Walter M. Fitch in 1971. Maximum parsimony is an intuitive and simple criterion, and it is popular for this reason. However, although it is easy to score a phylogenetic tree (by counting the number of character-state changes), there is no algorithm to quickly generate the most-parsimonious tree.

MacLeod & Rubenstein (2006), §3. One with a nominalist view claims that we predicate the same property of/to multiple entities, but argues that the entities only share a name and not have a real quality in common. Nominalists often argue this view by claiming that nominalism can account for all the relevant phenomena, and therefore—by Occam's razor, and its principle of simplicity—nominalism is preferable, since it posits fewer entities. Different variants and versions of nominalism have been endorsed or defended by many, including Chrysippus,John Sellars, Stoicism, Routledge, 2014, pp.

In general, model complexity involves a trade- off between simplicity and accuracy of the model. Occam's razor is a principle particularly relevant to modeling, its essential idea being that among models with roughly equal predictive power, the simplest one is the most desirable. While added complexity usually improves the realism of a model, it can make the model difficult to understand and analyze, and can also pose computational problems, including numerical instability. Thomas Kuhn argues that as science progresses, explanations tend to become more complex before a paradigm shift offers radical simplification.

In a 2012 article in Psychological Bulletin it is suggested the subadditivity effect can be explained by an information- theoretic generative mechanism that assumes a noisy conversion of objective evidence (observation) into subjective estimates (judgment). This explanation is different than support theory, proposed as an explanation by Tversky and Koehler, which requires additional assumptions. Since mental noise is a sufficient explanation that is much simpler and straightforward than any explanation involving heuristics or behavior, Occam's razor would argue in its favor as the underlying generative mechanism (it is the hypotheses which makes the fewest assumptions).

Minimum description length (MDL) refers to various formalizations of Occam's razor based on formal languages used to parsimoniously describe data. In its most basic form, MDL is a model selection principle: the shortest description of the data as the best model. These descriptions are intended to provide data-driven scientific models. This idea can be extended to other forms of inductive inference and learning, beyond model selection - it can also be used for estimation and sequential prediction, for example, without explicitly identifying a single model for the data.

The pioneering development of the scientific method by the Arab Ash'ari polymath Ibn al-Haytham (Alhacen) was an important contribution to the philosophy of science. In The Model of the Motions, Ibn al-Haytham also describes an early version of Occam's razor, where he employs only minimal hypotheses regarding the properties that characterize astronomical motions, as he attempts to eliminate from his planetary model the cosmological hypotheses that cannot be observed from Earth.Roshdi Rashed (2007). "The Celestial Kinematics of Ibn al-Haytham", Arabic Sciences and Philosophy 17, p.

A single instance of Occam's razor favoring a wrong theory falsifies the razor as a general principle. Michael Lee and others provide cases in which a parsimonious approach does not guarantee a correct conclusion and, if based on incorrect working hypotheses or interpretations of incomplete data, may even strongly support a false conclusion. If multiple models of natural law make exactly the same testable predictions, they are equivalent and there is no need for parsimony to choose a preferred one. For example, Newtonian, Hamiltonian and Lagrangian classical mechanics are equivalent.

The cladists hold that genealogy alone should determine classification, pheneticists contend that overall similarity is the determining criterion, while evolutionary taxonomists say that both genealogy and similarity count in classification. It is among the cladists that Occam's razor is to be found, although their term for it is cladistic parsimony. Cladistic parsimony (or maximum parsimony) is a method of phylogenetic inference in the construction of types of phylogenetic trees (more specifically, cladograms). Cladograms are branching, tree-like structures used to represent hypotheses of relative degree of relationship, based on shared, derived character states.

Quine, in a discussion on definition, referred to these two perspectives as "economy of practical expression" and "economy in grammar and vocabulary", respectively. Galileo Galilei lampooned the misuse of Occam's razor in his Dialogue. The principle is represented in the dialogue by Simplicio. The telling point that Galileo presented ironically was that if one really wanted to start from a small number of entities, one could always consider the letters of the alphabet as the fundamental entities, since one could construct the whole of human knowledge out of them.

Part of a page from John Duns Scotus's book Commentaria oxoniensia ad IV libros magistri Sententiarus, showing the words: "", i.e., "Plurality is not to be posited without necessity" The origins of what has come to be known as Occam's razor are traceable to the works of earlier philosophers such as John Duns Scotus (1265–1308), Robert Grosseteste (1175–1253), Maimonides (Moses ben-Maimon, 1138–1204), and even Aristotle (384–322 BC).Aristotle, Physics 189a15, On the Heavens 271a33. See also Franklin, op cit. note 44 to chap. 9.

A theoretical justification for regularization is that it attempts to impose Occam's razor on the solution (as depicted in the figure above, where the green function, the simpler one, may be preferred). From a Bayesian point of view, many regularization techniques correspond to imposing certain prior distributions on model parameters.For the connection between maximum a posteriori estimation and ridge regression, see Regularization can serve multiple purposes, including learning simpler models, inducing models to be sparse and introducing group structure into the learning problem. The same idea arose in many fields of science.

Meanwhile, Turk is challenged with choosing the semi-annual candy bar he is allowed to eat because of his diabetes. He, too, has an epiphany and decides to make a random selection. Throughout the episode, Dr. Cox, Turk, and Dr. Kelso pull together to diagnose a very charming patient, Joe Hutnik. Cox, upon telling Dr. Beardfacé that if he wants to lose the nickname "Beardface", he has to shave his beard, realizes that his initial diagnosis of Lyme disease was correct, citing Occam's Razor (which J.D. references internally while holding a Razr cell phone).

Oxford's philosophical tradition started in the medieval era, with Robert Grosseteste and William of Ockham, commonly known for Occam's razor, among those teaching at the university. Thomas Hobbes, Jeremy Bentham and the empiricist John Locke received degrees from Oxford. Though the latter's main works were written after leaving Oxford, Locke was heavily influenced by his twelve years at the university. Oxford philosophers of the 20th century include J.L. Austin, a leading proponent of ordinary-language philosophy, Gilbert Ryle, author of The Concept of Mind, and Derek Parfit, who specialised in personal identity.

Vedral believes in the principle that information is physical. Creation ex nihilo comes from Catholic dogma, the idea being that God created the universe out of nothing. Vedral says that invoking a supernatural being as an explanation for creation does not explain reality because the supernatural being would have to come into existence itself too somehow presumably from nothing (or else from an infinite regression of supernatural beings), thus of course the reality can come from nothing without a supernatural being. Occam's razor principle favours the simplest explanation.

Finally, the term is sometimes applied to less rigorous ideas that may be interesting observations or relationships, practical or ethical guidelines (also called rules of thumb), and even humorous parodies of such laws. Examples of scientific laws include Boyle's law of gases, conservation laws, Ohm's law, and others. Laws of other fields of study include Occam's razor as a principle of philosophy and Say's law in economics. Examples of observed phenomena often described as laws include the Titius-Bode law of planetary positions, Zipf's law of linguistics, Thomas Malthus's Principle of Population or Malthusian Growth Model, Moore's law of technological growth.

Joel Best, a professor of criminal justice and sociology, described Cult and Ritual Abuse as having the "trappings" of a scholarly book, but as ultimately incoherent. He pointed out that even Noblitt and Perskin state their evidence is not compelling. Despite acknowledging the need for parsimony as in Occam's razor (i.e., favoring the simplest explanation that accounts for the evidence), Best notes the authors accept the less parsimonious proposition: that multigenerational, multinational abusive entities exist and have existed for centuries without discovery, rather than the more parsimonious idea that the patients are disturbed, malingering or mistaken.

William of Ockham gives a good concept of motion for many people in the Middle Ages. There is an issue with the vocabulary behind motion which makes people think that there is a correlation between nouns and the qualities that make nouns. Ockham states that this distinction is what will allow people to understand motion, that motion is a property of mobiles, locations, and forms and that is all that is required to define what motion is. A famous example of this is Occam's razor which simplifies vague statements by cutting them into more descriptive examples.

Thus, he reasons, it is preferred over other theories-of-everything by Occam's Razor. Tegmark also considers augmenting the MUH with a second assumption, the computable universe hypothesis (CUH), which says that the mathematical structure that is our external physical reality is defined by computable functions. The MUH is related to Tegmark's categorization of four levels of the multiverse. This categorization posits a nested hierarchy of increasing diversity, with worlds corresponding to different sets of initial conditions (level 1), physical constants (level 2), quantum branches (level 3), and altogether different equations or mathematical structures (level 4).

Bradley Steffens, "Who Was the First Scientist?", Ezine Articles.) #Observation #Statement of problem #Formulation of hypothesis #Testing of hypothesis using experimentation #Analysis of experimental results #Interpretation of data and formulation of conclusion #Publication of findings In The Model of the Motions, Ibn al-Haytham also describes an early version of Occam's razor, where he employs only minimal hypotheses regarding the properties that characterize astronomical motions, as he attempts to eliminate from his planetary model the cosmological hypotheses that cannot be observed from Earth.Roshdi Rashed (2007). "The Celestial Kinematics of Ibn al-Haytham", Arabic Sciences and Philosophy 17, pp.

3–140 of Bryce Seligman DeWitt, R. Neill Graham, eds, The Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, Princeton Series in Physics, Princeton University Press (1973), . In the Everettian view, then, the Bohm particles are superfluous entities, similar to, and equally as unnecessary as, for example, the luminiferous ether, which was found to be unnecessary in special relativity. This argument is sometimes called the "redundancy argument", since the superfluous particles are redundant in the sense of Occam's razor. According to Brown & Wallace, the de Broglie–Bohm particles play no role in the solution of the measurement problem.

Dawkins summarizes his argument as follows;The God Delusion, p. 157–8. the references to "crane" and "skyhook" are two notions from Daniel Dennett's book Darwin's Dangerous Idea. A central thesis of the argument is that compared to supernatural abiogenesis, evolution by natural selection requires the supposition of fewer hypothetical processes; according to Occam's razor, therefore, it is a better explanation. Dawkins cites a paragraph where Richard Swinburne agrees that a simpler explanation is better but reasons that theism is simpler because it only invokes a single substance (God) as a cause and maintainer of every other object.

Occam's Razor, seeking the simplest explanation, forms much of the basis of modern scientific thought; a theory which accounts best for all observed phenomena, does not predict disproven phenomena, and does not introduce unobserved phenomena is to be preferred. Moreover, data obtained by one experiment can be applied to more than one hypothesis, and proven hypotheses can be applied to more than one theory. For example, the theory of gravity has implications for innumerable other theories. There is not an infinite number of possible theories, since the available theories are limited by the ideas which have actually been imagined by scientists.

In doing so he is invoking a variant of Occam's razor known as Morgan's Canon: "In no case is an animal activity to be interpreted in terms of higher psychological processes, if it can be fairly interpreted in terms of processes which stand lower in the scale of psychological evolution and development." (Morgan 1903). However, more recent biological analyses, such as Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene, have contended that Morgan's Canon is not the simplest and most basic explanation. Dawkins argues the way evolution works is that the genes propagated in most copies end up determining the development of that particular species, i.e.

In his article "Sensations and Brain Processes" (1959), J. J. C. Smart invoked Occam's razor with the aim to justify his preference of the mind-brain identity theory over spirit-body dualism. Dualists state that there are two kinds of substances in the universe: physical (including the body) and spiritual, which is non-physical. In contrast, identity theorists state that everything is physical, including consciousness, and that there is nothing nonphysical. Though it is impossible to appreciate the spiritual when limiting oneself to the physical, Smart maintained that identity theory explains all phenomena by assuming only a physical reality.

The razor's statement that "other things being equal, simpler explanations are generally better than more complex ones" is amenable to empirical testing. Another interpretation of the razor's statement would be that "simpler hypotheses are generally better than the complex ones". The procedure to test the former interpretation would compare the track records of simple and comparatively complex explanations. If one accepts the first interpretation, the validity of Occam's razor as a tool would then have to be rejected if the more complex explanations were more often correct than the less complex ones (while the converse would lend support to its use).

William H. Jefferys and James O. Berger (1991) generalize and quantify the original formulation's "assumptions" concept as the degree to which a proposition is unnecessarily accommodating to possible observable data. (preprint available as "Sharpening Occam's Razor on a Bayesian Strop"). They state, "A hypothesis with fewer adjustable parameters will automatically have an enhanced posterior probability, due to the fact that the predictions it makes are sharp." The model they propose balances the precision of a theory's predictions against their sharpness—preferring theories that sharply make correct predictions over theories that accommodate a wide range of other possible results.

The theory should have, at least as a secondary objective, a certain economy and elegance (compare to mathematical beauty), a notion sometimes called "Occam's razor" after the 13th-century English philosopher William of Occam (or Ockham), in which the simpler of two theories that describe the same matter just as adequately is preferred (but conceptual simplicity may mean mathematical complexity).Simplicity in the Philosophy of Science (retrieved 19 Aug 2014), Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. They are also more likely to be accepted if they connect a wide range of phenomena. Testing the consequences of a theory is part of the scientific method.

Bryan Singer directed the pilot episode and the third episode, "Occam's Razor". House was a co-production of Heel and Toe Films, Shore Z Productions, and Bad Hat Harry Productions in association with Universal Network Television for Fox. Paul Attanasio and Katie Jacobs, the heads of Heel and Toe Films; David Shore, the head of Shore Z Productions; and Bryan Singer, the head of Bad Hat Harry Productions, were executive producers of the program for its entirety. Lawrence Kaplow, Peter Blake, and Thomas L. Moran joined the staff as writers at the beginning of the first season after the making of the pilot episode.

A heuristic argument is an argument that reasons from the value of a method or principle that has been shown experimentally (especially through trial-and- error) to be useful or convincing in learning, discovery and problem-solving, but whose line of reasoning involves key oversimplifications that make it not entirely rigorous. A widely used and important example of a heuristic argument is Occam's Razor. It is a speculative, non-rigorous argument that relies on analogy or intuition, and that allows one to achieve a result or an approximation that is to be checked later with more rigor. Otherwise, the results are generally to be doubted.

The principle most likely finds its origins in similar minimalist concepts, such as Occam's razor, Leonardo da Vinci's "Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication", Shakespeare's "Brevity is the soul of wit", Mies Van Der Rohe's "Less is more", Bjarne Stroustrup's "Make Simple Tasks Simple!", or Antoine de Saint Exupéry's "It seems that perfection is reached not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away". Colin Chapman, the founder of Lotus Cars, urged his designers to "Simplify, then add lightness". Heath Robinson machines and Rube Goldberg's machines, intentionally overly-complex solutions to simple tasks or problems, are humorous examples of "non-KISS" solutions.

The first half of the 14th century saw the scientific work of great thinkers. The logic studies by William of Occam led him to postulate a specific formulation of the principle of parsimony, known today as Occam's razor. This principle is one of the main heuristics used by modern science to select between two or more underdetermined theories, though it is only fair to point out that this principle was employed explicitly by both Aquinas and Aristotle before him. As Western scholars became more aware (and more accepting) of controversial scientific treatises of the Byzantine and Islamic Empires these readings sparked new insights and speculation.

320th STS personnel deployed alongside United States Army Special Forces to the War in Afghanistan. On 28 February 2006, squadron Master Sergeant David Beals' team was ambushed during a convoy operation, trapping the entire team in the insurgent kill zone. Beals was credited with saving the lives of the entire team by repulsing the attack with his Humvee's M240 machine gun and 40mm grenades from his M203 grenade launcher, and was awarded the Bronze Star Medal with "V" device. On 26 September 2008, squadron personnel cooperated with the 1st Special Operations Squadron and 31st Rescue Squadron to rescue two crewmen injured in a crane accident aboard container ship Occam's Razor.

Through the Middle Ages in the many records nationally (such as Assize Rolls and feet of fines), Ockham features no high nobles among its owners. However it is the birthplace of William of OckhamOld claims that he was born in a hamlet of Ockham in Yorkshire have since before 1997 been countered by a mass of more local records indicating that his birthplace was in Surrey. See the famous mediaeval philosopher and the proponent of Occam's razor. Byron's daughter, Ada Lovelace, lived briefly at Ockham Park before settling at Horsley Towers, which her husband the 1st Earl of Lovelace built in the village of East Horsley.

James Randi is a well-known investigator of paranormal claims. Scientific skeptics advocate critical investigation of claims of paranormal phenomena: applying the scientific method to reach a rational, scientific explanation of the phenomena to account for the paranormal claims, taking into account that alleged paranormal abilities and occurrences are sometimes hoaxes or misinterpretations of natural phenomena. A way of summarizing this method is by the application of Occam's razor, which suggests that the simpler solution is usually the correct one. The standard scientific models give the explanation that what appears to be paranormal phenomena is usually a misinterpretation, misunderstanding, or anomalous variation of natural phenomena, rather than an actual paranormal phenomenon.

As a logical principle, Occam's razor would demand that scientists accept the simplest possible theoretical explanation for existing data. However, science has shown repeatedly that future data often support more complex theories than do existing data. Science prefers the simplest explanation that is consistent with the data available at a given time, but the simplest explanation may be ruled out as new data become available. That is, science is open to the possibility that future experiments might support more complex theories than demanded by current data and is more interested in designing experiments to discriminate between competing theories than favoring one theory over another based merely on philosophical principles.

In his 1651 work Almagestum Novum, Giovanni Battista Riccioli set out 126 arguments against the Copernican model of the universe. In his 43rd argument, Riccioli considered the points Galileo had made in his Letters on Sunspots, and asserted that a heliocentric (Copernican) explanation of the phenomenon was more speculative, while a geocentric model allowed for a more parsimonious explanation and was thus more satisfactory (ref: Occam's Razor).Christopher M. Graney, Setting Aside All Authority, University of Notre Dame Press, 2015, pp.111–12 As Riccioli explained it, whether the Sun went round the Earth or the Earth round the Sun, three movements were necessary to explain the movement of sunspots.

Berkeley, for example, argued against universals or abstract objects using nominalistic arguments. He used the term idea to denote specific perceptions of an atomistic nature. They could be grouped through similarities or one could take a specific instance, for example the green hue of this frog one is looking at now, as a kind of paradigm case or prototype, and regard everything that was similar to it as belonging to the same type or category. One attraction of the nominalistic program is that if it can be carried out it solves Plato's problem in Parmenides, since the need for a single idea or form or universal green then vanishes and it can be expunged through Occam's razor, i.e.

The contribution of NFL is that it tells us choosing an appropriate algorithm requires making assumptions about the kinds of target functions the algorithm is being used for. With no assumptions, no "meta-algorithm", such as the scientific method, performs better than random choice. While some scholars argue that NFL conveys important insight, others argue that NFL is of little relevance to machine learning research. If Occam's razor is correct, for example if sequences of lower Kolmogorov complexity are more probable than sequences of higher complexity, then (as is observed in real life) some algorithms, such as cross-validation, perform better on average on practical problems (when compared with random choice or with anti- cross-validation).

Restitution (1998) (long-listed for the Booker Prize), eventually brings past and present together, as a young London woman gradually realizes her identity is unexpectedly altered by events in Nazi Germany half a century before. Some of Duffy's novels deploy the storytelling techniques of thrillers, including I want to go to Moscow (1973), Housespy (1978), Occam's Razor (1991), Alchemy (2004), The Orpheus Trail (2009) and In Times Like These (2013). Political passion often animates her work. The Microcosm makes the case for acceptance of lesbians; Gor Saga challenges assumptions about the gulf between humans and other species; In Times Like These warns of dangers in possible Scottish independence and in withdrawal of England and Wales from the European Union.

Another school of thought is that PSO should be simplified as much as possible without impairing its performance; a general concept often referred to as Occam's razor. Simplifying PSO was originally suggested by Kennedy and has been studied more extensively, where it appeared that optimization performance was improved, and the parameters were easier to tune and they performed more consistently across different optimization problems. Another argument in favour of simplifying PSO is that metaheuristics can only have their efficacy demonstrated empirically by doing computational experiments on a finite number of optimization problems. This means a metaheuristic such as PSO cannot be proven correct and this increases the risk of making errors in its description and implementation.

Ibn al-Haytham also describes an early version of Occam's razor, where he employs only minimal hypotheses regarding the properties that characterize astronomical motions, as he attempts to eliminate from his planetary model the cosmological hypotheses that cannot be observed from Earth. In 1030, Abū al-Rayhān al- Bīrūnī discussed the Indian planetary theories of Aryabhata, Brahmagupta and Varahamihira in his Ta'rikh al-Hind (Latinized as Indica). Biruni stated that Brahmagupta and others consider that the earth rotates on its axis and Biruni noted that this does not create any mathematical problems. Abu Said al-Sijzi, a contemporary of al-Biruni, suggested the possible heliocentric movement of the Earth around the Sun, which al-Biruni did not reject.

Minimum message length (MML) is a Bayesian information-theoretic method for statistical model comparison and selection. It provides a formal information theory restatement of Occam's Razor: even when models are equal in their measure of fit-accuracy to the observed data, the one generating the most concise explanation of data is more likely to be correct (where the explanation consists of the statement of the model, followed by the lossless encoding of the data using the stated model). MML was invented by Chris Wallace, first appearing in the seminal paper "An information measure for classification". MML is intended not just as a theoretical construct, but as a technique that may be deployed in practice.

136 by Shmuel Sambursky (1974) Physical thought from the Presocratics to the Quantum Physicists He also demonstrated the conjecture by placing a straight stick or a taut thread next to the light beam.p.136, as quoted by Shmuel Sambursky (1974) Physical thought from the Presocratics to the Quantum Physicists Ibn al-Haytham also employed scientific skepticism and emphasized the role of empiricism. He also explained the role of induction in syllogism, and criticized Aristotle for his lack of contribution to the method of induction, which Ibn al-Haytham regarded as superior to syllogism, and he considered induction to be the basic requirement for true scientific research. Something like Occam's razor is also present in the Book of Optics.

136 by Shmuel Sambursky (1974) Physical thought from the Presocratics to the Quantum Physicists He also demonstrated the conjecture by placing a straight stick or a taut thread next to the light beam.p.136, as quoted by Shmuel Sambursky (1974) Physical thought from the Presocratics to the Quantum Physicists Ibn al-Haytham employed scientific skepticism, emphasizing the role of empiricism and explaining the role of induction in syllogism. He went so far as to criticize Aristotle for his lack of contribution to the method of induction, which Ibn al-Haytham regarded as being not only superior to syllogism but the basic requirement for true scientific research. Something like Occam's razor is also present in the Book of Optics.

The phrase Occam's razor did not appear until a few centuries after William of Ockham's death in 1347. Libert Froidmont, in his On Christian Philosophy of the Soul, takes credit for the phrase, speaking of "novacula occami". Ockham did not invent this principle, but the "razor"—and its association with him—may be due to the frequency and effectiveness with which he used it.Roger Ariew, Ockham's Razor: A Historical and Philosophical Analysis of Ockham's Principle of Parsimony, 1976 Ockham stated the principle in various ways, but the most popular version, "Entities are not to be multiplied without necessity" () was formulated by the Irish Franciscan philosopher John Punch in his 1639 commentary on the works of Duns Scotus.

For example, Max Planck interpolated between the Wien and Jeans radiation laws and used Occam's razor logic to formulate the quantum hypothesis, even resisting that hypothesis as it became more obvious that it was correct. Appeals to simplicity were used to argue against the phenomena of meteorites, ball lightning, continental drift, and reverse transcriptase. One can argue for atomic building blocks for matter, because it provides a simpler explanation for the observed reversibility of both mixing and chemical reactions as simple separation and rearrangements of atomic building blocks. At the time, however, the atomic theory was considered more complex because it implied the existence of invisible particles that had not been directly detected.

In his example the nomological danglers would be sensations such that are not able to be explained by the scientific theory of brain processes. Some mental entities for example in a phenomenological field, are not able to be found (and do not behave in the way that is expected) in physics. In the context Smart uses it, he is criticising dualism and epiphenomenalism as philosophies of mind, and the concerns over physical and causal laws they raise. Smart puts forward his own theory in the form of materialism, claiming it is a better theory, in part because it is free from these nomological danglers, making it superior in accordance with Occam's razor.

The family tree with the least amount of these 'steps' (transitions) is likely to be the most accurate, based on the principal of occam's razor (the simplest answer is the most accurate). Bremer support is used to label how well-supported clades are by analyzing how they are distributed among more complex alternatives to the simplest (most parsimonious) tree. Clades which do not exist in a family tree which is only one total step more complex than the MPT (most parsimonious tree) have a Bremer support of 1, meaning that the clade's existence is very uncertain. Even if the MPT of the present analysis supports their existence, new data may make a competing family tree more parsimonious, dissolving clades which are only supported in the current MPT.

Some controversial taxa thus had to be omitted by the subtree in order for the resulting cladogram to fulfill the second requirement. The biogeographical tree (i.e. the following cladogram) is basically the 50% majority rule tree, except with some of the polytomies resolved according to the results of the maximum agreement subtree: The following cladogram is based on a 2017 phylogenetic analysis of the Ankylosaurinae conducted by Victoria Arbour and David Evans. The cladogram depicts the majority rule (average result) of 10 most parsimonious trees, which each are considered to have the fewest evolutionary steps, thus being the most accurate under the principle of Occam's razor: Reconstructed skeleton based on S. thronus holotype specimen ROM 1930 Life restoration of Scolosaurus cutleri.

One important contribution that he made to modern science and modern intellectual culture was efficient reasoning with the principle of parsimony in explanation and theory building that came to be known as Occam's Razor. This maxim, as interpreted by Bertrand Russell, states that if one can explain a phenomenon without assuming this or that hypothetical entity, there is no ground for assuming it, i.e. that one should always opt for an explanation in terms of the fewest possible causes, factors, or variables. He turned this into a concern for ontological parsimony; the principle says that one should not multiply entities beyond necessity – – although this well-known formulation of the principle is not to be found in any of William's extant writings.

Newton's Flaming Laser Sword (also known as Alder's razor) is a philosophical razor devised by Alder and discussed in an essay in the May/June 2004 issue of Philosophy Now, Also available as and addresses the differing views of scientists and philosophers on epistemology and knowledge. Alder summarized the principle as follows: > In its weakest form it says that we should not dispute propositions unless > they can be shown by precise logic and/or mathematics to have observable > consequences. In its strongest form it demands a list of observable > consequences and a formal demonstration that they are indeed consequences of > the proposition claimed. The razor is humorously named after Isaac Newton, as it is inspired by Newtonian thought, and is called a "Laser Sword" because it is "much sharper and more dangerous than Occam's Razor".

While the model has greatly aided soil science, and spatially explains generalized soil- environmental relationships on landscapes, the device—supremely attractive in its parsimony—has constrained pedologic interpretation because its genetic- interpretive domain is constrained by its broad factorial (landscape context) tenets. The model allows for a wide-ranging generalized assessment of soilscapes, and is useful in soil chronosequence work (Birkeland 1974, 1984) but the biodynamic soil processes that are largely responsible in producing stonelayers are absent at a highest theoretical (five factors) level. Once mapped and classified, soils become static elements, which—while societally useful, scientifically misrepresents their true biodynamic nature. In a proposal to heal such Occam's razor wounds, process biodynamics supported with appropriate genetic language has been advanced to augment the traditional five factors genetic principles in pedology and soil-geomorphology.

Purposely-bad fan art and animation of Shrek and loyalty towards the song "All Star" by pop rock group Smash Mouth, which played in the first film of the series, are also considered traits of the Internet's obsession towards Shrek. Sims wrote that one possible reason of Shrek's Internet fanbase was that the franchise was a depiction of "everything that was initially exciting and then quickly patronizing" about the early 2000s, saying that "It's symbolic of so many things we briefly loved before quickly realizing their emptiness." He also said that with many other memes, Occam's razor is a factor: "Shrek has a funny, stupid face, and putting that face in a weird place provokes a cheap laugh." The online appreciation of Shrek has also been described as ironic.

Some astronomers have speculated that the objects eclipsing Tabby's Star could be parts of a megastructure made by an alien civilization, such as a Dyson swarm, a hypothetical structure that an advanced civilization might build around a star to intercept some of its light for their energy needs. According to Steinn Sigurðsson, the megastructure hypothesis is implausible and disfavored by Occam's razor and fails to sufficiently explain the dimming. He says that it remains a valid subject for scientific investigation, however, because it is a falsifiable hypothesis. Due to extensive media coverage on this matter, Tabby's Star has been compared by Kepler's Steve Howell to , another star with an odd light curve that was shown, after years of research, to be a part of a five-star system.

The maximization of parsimony (preferring the simpler of two otherwise equally adequate theorizations) has proven useful in many fields. Occam's razor, a principle of theoretical parsimony suggested by William of Ockham in the 1320s, asserted that it is vain to give an explanation which involves more assumptions than necessary. Alternatively, phylogenetic parsimony can be characterized as favoring the trees that maximize explanatory power by minimizing the number of observed similarities that cannot be explained by inheritance and common descent. Minimization of required evolutionary change on the one hand and maximization of observed similarities that can be explained as homology on the other may result in different preferred trees when some observed features are not applicable in some groups that are included in the tree, and the latter can be seen as the more general approach.

Some of his ideas have been readopted by other historians that doubt the historical chronology of the Antiquity and the Middle Ages, while all "mainstream" historians consider them valueless and argue that inventing 3000 years of history, its written accounts, literature, poetry etc. and destroying all the traces of this fraud was a work one generation of writers could never fulfill. The enormous expenditure of work this fraud would have needed makes these theories much more improbable than the coincidence in the literary works pointed out by Baldauf (according to the scientific principle of Occam's razor). The ideas expressed in both books of Baldauf stand in the traditional line of French theologians like Jean Hardouin, Jean de Launoy (1603–1678) and Barthelemy Germon, S.J. (1683-1712 or 1718).

Alternate methods include maximum parsimony (MP) that construct a sequence based on a model of sequence evolution – usually the idea that the minimum number of nucleotidal sequence changes represents the most efficient route for evolution to take and by Occam's razor is the most likely. MP is often considered the least reliable method for reconstruction as it arguably oversimplifies evolution to a degree that is not applicable on the billion year scale. Another method involves the consideration of residue uncertainty – so-called Bayesian methods – this form of ASR is sometimes used to complement ML methods but typically produces more ambiguous sequences. In ASR, the term 'ambiguity' refers to residue positions where no clear substitution can be predicted – often in these cases, several ASR sequences are produced, encompassing most of the ambiguities and compared to one-another.

He has been a guest on more than 100 national and local talk shows from the 1960s into the 21st century promoting the Mickey Mouse Club for Disney and his own books, criticism, poetry and plays. As a writer, Lonnie is the author of a memoir, The Accidental Mouseketeer (2014) and Two for the Show: Great 20th Century Comedy Teams(2000). He has two poetry collections, forty-eight poems published in literary journals and newspapers and is the recipient of 11 poetry awards. He is a playwright with four produced plays (Occam's Razor, Over the Hill, Children Are Strangers and Exeunt All) and a musical (book and lyrics for Fantasies), which have been staged in Los Angeles, New York City, and Washington, DC, plus twenty-two nationally aired radio dramas for Heartbeat Theatre and two for American Radio Theatre.

49: "But if other possible worlds are causally disconnected from us, how do we know anything about them?" A related objection is that, while people are concerned with what they could have done, they are not concerned with what people in other worlds, no matter how similar to them, do. As Saul Kripke once put it, a presidential candidate could not care less whether someone else, in another world, wins an election, but does care whether he himself could have won it (Kripke 1980, p. 45). Another criticism of the realist approach to possible worlds is that it has an inflated ontology—by extending the property of concreteness to more than the singular actual world it multiplies theoretical entities beyond what should be necessary to its explanatory aims, thereby violating the principle of parsimony, Occam's razor.

" Although there have been a number of philosophers who have formulated similar anti-razors since Chatton's time, no one anti-razor has perpetuated in as much notability as Chatton's anti-razor, although this could be the case of the Late Renaissance Italian motto of unknown attribution ("Even if it is not true, it is well conceived") when referred to a particularly artful explanation. Anti-razors have also been created by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716), Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), and Karl Menger (1902–1985). Leibniz's version took the form of a principle of plenitude, as Arthur Lovejoy has called it: the idea being that God created the most varied and populous of possible worlds. Kant felt a need to moderate the effects of Occam's razor and thus created his own counter-razor: "The variety of beings should not rashly be diminished.

The argument from inconsistent revelations contests the existence of the deity called God as described in scriptures—such as the Hindu Vedas, the Jewish Tanakh, the Christian Bible, the Muslim Qur'an, the Book of Mormon or the Baha'i Aqdas—by identifying apparent contradictions between different scriptures, within a single scripture, or between scripture and known facts. Relatedly, the argument from parsimony (using Occam's razor) contends that since natural (non-supernatural) theories adequately explain the development of religion and belief in gods,Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought, Pascal Boyer, Basic Books (2001) the actual existence of such supernatural agents is superfluous and may be dismissed unless otherwise proven to be required to explain the phenomenon. The argument from "historical induction" concludes that since most theistic religions throughout history (e.g. ancient Egyptian religion, ancient Greek religion) and their gods ultimately come to be regarded as untrue or incorrect, all theistic religions, including contemporary ones, are therefore most likely untrue/incorrect by induction.

From among the distance methods, there exists a phylogenetic estimation criterion, known as Minimum Evolution (ME), that shares with maximum-parsimony the aspect of searching for the phylogeny that has the shortest total sum of branch lengths. A subtle difference distinguishes the maximum-parsimony criterion from the ME criterion: while maximum-parsimony is based on an abductive heuristic, i.e., the plausibility of the simplest evolutionary hypothesis of taxa with respect to the more complex ones, the ME criterion is based on Kidd and Sgaramella- Zonta's conjectures (proven true 22 years later by Rzhetsky and Nei) stating that if the evolutionary distances from taxa were unbiased estimates of the true evolutionary distances then the true phylogeny of taxa would have a length shorter than any other alternative phylogeny compatible with those distances. Rzhetsky and Nei's results set the ME criterion free from the Occam's razor principle and confer it a solid theoretical and quantitative basis.

Occam's razor might fall under the heading of "elegance", the first item on the list, but too zealous an application was cautioned by Albert Einstein: "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler." It is arguable that parsimony and elegance "typically pull in different directions". The falsifiability item on the list is related to the criterion proposed by Popper as demarcating a scientific theory from a theory like astrology: both "explain" observations, but the scientific theory takes the risk of making predictions that decide whether it is right or wrong: Thomas Kuhn argued that changes in scientists' views of reality not only contain subjective elements, but result from group dynamics, "revolutions" in scientific practice which result in paradigm shifts. As an example, Kuhn suggested that the heliocentric "Copernican Revolution" replaced the geocentric views of Ptolemy not because of empirical failures, but because of a new "paradigm" that exerted control over what scientists felt to be the more fruitful way to pursue their goals.

The boys encountered baffling, sometimes misleading clues and danger before finally solving the mystery. The series had one major theme: however strange, mystical, or even supernatural a particular phenomenon may seem at first, it is capable of being traced to human agency with the determined application of reason and logic. This theme was compromised on four occasions by Carey: in The Mystery of Monster Mountain, the boys encounter Bigfoot; in The Invisible Dog, she canonizes astral projection and dangles the possibility of a "phantom priest"; in The Mystery of the Scar-Faced Beggar, a woman has genuine prophetic dreams; and in the final book of the original run, The Mystery of the Cranky Collector, a young woman's ghost returns to haunt her former employer's mansion. Most mysteries were solved by Jupiter Jones, a supreme logician who implicitly used the Occam's Razor principle: that the simplest and most rational explanation should be preferred to an explanation which requires additional assumptions.

He also rejected outright the assertion that the transformation in question had "proceeded from, or [had been] excited into action by another [person]" (Neurypnology, p.32). On returning home on the evening of Saturday 20 November 1841, Braid performed his experimentum crucis; and, operating on the principle of Occam's Razor (that 'entities ought not to be multiplied beyond necessity'), and recognizing that he could diminish, rather than multiply entities, Braid made an extraordinary decision to perform a role-reversal and treat the operator- subject interaction as subject-internal, operator-guided procedure; rather than, as Lafontaine supposed, an operator-centred, subject-external procedure. Braid emphatically proved his point by his self-experimentation with his "upwards and inwards squint". In other words, rather than it being due, as Lafontaine supposed, to the charismatic influence of the operator's downward gaze, compounding the transfer of magnetic fluid that was supposedly being transferred, via the operator, through the subject's thumbs which were being tightly held by the operator, it was a simple biophysiological reflex produced by the subject's upward gaze.

However it does tend to suggest a possible area of weakness or future development for current theories such as the Standard Model, where some parameters vary by many orders of magnitude, and which require extensive "fine-tuning" of their current values of the models concerned. The concern is that it is not yet clear whether these seemingly exact values we currently recognize, have arisen by chance (based upon the anthropic principle or similar) or whether they arise from a more advanced theory not yet developed, in which these turn out to be expected and well-explained, because of other factors not yet part of particle physics models. The concept of naturalness is not always compatible with Occam's razor, since many instances of "natural" theories have more parameters than "fine-tuned" theories such as the Standard Model. Naturalness in physics is closely related to the issue of fine-tuning, and over the past decade many scientists argued that the principle of naturalness is a specific application of Bayesian statistics.

Pattern recognition is generally categorized according to the type of learning procedure used to generate the output value. Supervised learning assumes that a set of training data (the training set) has been provided, consisting of a set of instances that have been properly labeled by hand with the correct output. A learning procedure then generates a model that attempts to meet two sometimes conflicting objectives: Perform as well as possible on the training data, and generalize as well as possible to new data (usually, this means being as simple as possible, for some technical definition of "simple", in accordance with Occam's Razor, discussed below). Unsupervised learning, on the other hand, assumes training data that has not been hand-labeled, and attempts to find inherent patterns in the data that can then be used to determine the correct output value for new data instances.. A combination of the two that has recently been explored is semi-supervised learning, which uses a combination of labeled and unlabeled data (typically a small set of labeled data combined with a large amount of unlabeled data).