6.5 KiB
is there a phrase that means sort of the opposite of Occam's Razor?
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Author: u/Torvacht *
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URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/2zr57h/is_there_a_phrase_that_means_sort_of_the_opposite/
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Score: 13
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Created: 2015-03-20T23:18:14
Post:
not necessarily 'the most complicated answer is the likely correct one' but moreso i'm looking for 'the most narratively fulfilling answer is the likely correct one'? just curious if such a term exists.
Comments:
u/DCarrier [+20] (2 minutes later)
You mean like the Theory of Narrative Causality?
u/JackStargazer [+2] Primordial Apologist (16 hours later)
I was going to post this exact thing.
Well, good to know at least some of my mental processes are duplicated in others.
u/notmy2ndopinion [+13] Concent of Saunt Edhar (4 hours later)
In medicine, Occam's Razor is balanced by Hickam's Dictum: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hickam%27s_dictum
Best characterized as: the simplest answer isn't always the right one and things can be as complicated as they damn well please.
u/Jace_MacLeod [+15] (16 hours later)
Hickam's Dictum is basically a cautionary tale on a common misunderstanding of Occam's Razor. Occam's Razor says you should favor simple explanations for a given evidence, since p(AB|X) ≤ p(A|X), but this is assuming total ignorance! Complex hypotheses need to work harder to overcome their prior improbability, but it's not like they're forbidden. Sufficient evidence can and should make you update to privilege a complex explanation, if that's indeed where the evidence points.
Consider a doctor who has an appointment with a female patient complaining of a headache and runny nose. Even without meeting her, the doctor already knows it's probably the common cold. But if during the appointment he also notices she is dizzy, has poor skin elasticity, and has a rapid heartbeat - then he may very well conclude she is dehydrated, and just happened to catch a cold at the same time. It's a more complex explanation that will necessarily fit with less patients, but for this particular patient it explains the symptoms perfectly.
u/FountainsOfFluids [+7] (a day later)
And there are people who actually have Lupus.
u/LittleHelperRobot [+5] (4 hours later)
Non-mobile: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hickam%27s_dictum
^That's ^why ^I'm ^here, ^I ^don't ^judge ^you. ^PM ^/u/xl0 ^if ^I'm ^causing ^any ^trouble. ^WUT?
u/None [+16] (5 hours later)
You seem to mean something positive, maybe somewhat orthogonal to Occam's Razor. But ignoring your body text and answering the topic title, as a pejorative, my personal TV-Trope name for the inverse of Occam's Razor is "Ice Surfer Jesus".
That's named after people who take Bible miracles and neither disbelieve them ("Jesus never walked on water") nor yet actually believe them ("Jesus walked on water") but instead concoct far-fetched naturalistic explanations for how the miracle might have happened ("Jesus could have stood on a transient ice floe in the Sea of Galilee").
Yes, this is a real phenomenon, and yes, that's a real example that people have suggested in seriousness, and no, I don't understand it the tiniest bit.
u/None [+7] (9 hours later)
I'm going to be remembering that as my go-to explanation for why I find "sophisticated" and "grown-up" religion to be far more flagrantly bullshit than "childish", naive, folk-belief religion.
You can also call it "Maimonides' Reed Sea Apology", after the Rambam claiming that, well, sometimes the Reed Sea parts for purely naturalistic reasons, and the fact that it did so when the Children of Israel were crossing it (aka: at a lucky time) is the miracle.
u/GopherAtl [+5] (an hour later)
nothing comes to mind; there's a vaguely similar idea expressed by Douglass Adams that goes something like "Sometimes the impossible has a certain integrity that the merely improbable lacks." Which isn't exactly about simplicity/complexity, but can apply to a complex-but-known-possible theory versus a simple but believed-impossible one.
u/GopherAtl [+2] (2 days later)
just to tack on some afterthoughts here, on the face of it (and as applied in DA's books), this might seem like just a silly joke of an idea, but it actually has solid applications as well. When a theory to fit the facts as you understand them becomes sufficiently convoluted, there comes a point where you ought to re-check your assumptions about what is possible or impossible.
u/blazinghand [+3] Chaos Undivided (an hour later)
Hmm, not exactly what you're looking for, but I remember a Mark Twain quotation that seems related: "Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't."
u/drageuth2 [+3] (3 days later)
Occam's Beard.
u/mrectorslp22 [+1] (9 years later)
😂 9 years after this was posted, and it is underrated!
u/fridaygrace [+1] (6 years later)
6 years later, I’d like to commend you on this under-upvoted comment.
u/Ty-Guy9 [+2] Wants to become a "FAI" (8 hours later)
Hmm. Narratively fulfulling? That sounds at first like writing a "good story", and reminds me of Order of the Stick's genre-referencial decision logic (in Elan's father Tarquin's story arc) that says things like (and I'm making this example up) you shouldn't expect the main bad guy to be defeated in any way other than by the main characters, with plenty of drama and probably an epic battle. So that means don't even bother hiring an NPC assassin and expecting it to go as planned.
Or were you talking about something else? Maybe you mean something like 'the answer that connects the most dots in the "narrative" of reality'?
u/Omelethead [+2] (23 hours later)
I've always thought "Correllation does not imply Causation" is sort of an anti-Occam's Razor.
The conclusion "Ice Cream causes Drowning" is pretty simple, but reality is a bit more complex.
u/CopperZirconium [+1] (2 days later)
Drowning? That's ridiculous, but polio...
u/No_Inside_5475 [+1] (9 years later)
Don’t know but I always thought Arkham’s razor was the opposite. Don’t know why I got that from Batman
u/Own_Oil_1126 [+1] (8 years later)
Sure, not being a dumbass