What Are Philosophical Razors?
Plus, did I manage to hit my goal of writing 60k words in 22 days? And a movie recommendation.
Issue No. 22
It would be pretty low-brow if I began with a picture of someone shaving with a razor, wouldn’t it? We’re better than that, aren’t we? I thought so.
I had reason to look up Occam’s razor the other day. Searching it brought up a list of other philosophical razors, and so I thought it would be interesting to see what some of those are about and how useful they are for thinking about things in everyday life.
Here’s the long and short of it: all of us have to deal with making decisions, often on the basis of incomplete data. Just like an actual razor shaves off needless hair, a philosophical razor metaphorically shaves off needless ideas, and helps us decide between fewer competing ones that are otherwise comparable.1
That’s the general promise, at least. It’s important not to over-rely on them or mistake them for immutable laws. Think of them as heuristics or rules of thumb. A rule of thumb is true for most things, most of the time, but not for all things, all the time. It might be helpful in one discipline, but not so much in another.
The only razor I’d ever heard of was Occam’s razor, which espouses parsimony. Here are a few that I thought were interesting, and in the spirit of reminding us that they’re rules of thumb, there’s a counterpoint for each one.
1 Occam’s razor
All things being equal, when faced with competing explanations, the explanation with the fewest assumptions is usually the better one.
You’ve got two explanations for how a wind-up toy works. One explanation assumes a tiny leprechaun—possibly invisible, possibly bearded—is sitting between the toy’s gears, turning one of the gears by hand. The other explanation explains it with Newton’s laws of motion and the law of conservation of energy, both of which are falsifiable.
The explanation that has fewer assumptions (namely, the one without the tiny, invisible, bearded leprechaun with a mole on his right cheek) is likely the better one.
If a patient comes in complaining of a blocked ear, a doctor might make an initial diagnosis of ear wax build-up and a differential diagnosis of some super-rare disorder. The evidence supports both diagnoses. But ear wax build-up requires fewer assumptions, on account of it being more common and quicker to diagnose. The super-rare disorder requires assumptions about, say, genetic conditions and unusual infections. So the doctor starts with the more probable explanation.
Counterpoint: It turns out the patient has that super-rare disorder. All we’ve gained from starting with the more simple explanation is we’ve given the actual disease time to progress.
2 Grice’s razor
When someone says something, interpret what they’re saying based on what they likely mean rather than what they’re literally saying.
Alan: Are you going to Paul’s party?
Barb: I have to work.2
What is Barb saying? Literally, she’s saying she has to work. What is she implying? That because she has to work, she can’t go to Paul’s party.
Carla is a dispatcher in Denver, where it is sunny and dry. Don is a truck driver trying to get over the continental divide during a blizzard.
Carla: How’s the weather over there?
Don: The weather’s lovely.3
What is Don saying? Literally, he’s saying the weather’s nice. What is he actually saying? He’s using irony to say the weather’s in fact terrible.
When deciding between two explanations of what a person who says something means, assume they’re trying to communicate efficiently and honestly and opt for the explanation that makes the fewest assumptions about them. It makes for a much more constructive way of communicating when we’re not fishing for subtext the whole time. This does mean that for everyday conversation, we need to be aware of idioms, irony, hyperbole, and other elements of spoken style.
The principle is named after Paul Grice. His work on implicatures4 is pretty interesting, and I might dedicate a future issue to it once I’ve read more on it.
Counterpoint: In political speech, for instance, we find intentional ambiguity everywhere. Either as doublespeak in the case of the powerful, or out of fear in the case of the powerless. We’d be constantly led astray if we took everything at face value and didn’t assume subtext.
3 Alder’s razor
If an argument or claim can’t be settled by experiment or observation, then it’s not worth debating.
When deciding whether to expend energy debating something, consider whether or not that thing can be proven through direct evidence. If something is purely speculative and can’t be tested through practical means, then maybe it’s not a good use of time to argue about it.
A marketing team debates two strategies for a product launch. One is based on ideas from literature about consumer psychology that aren’t repeatable and aren’t even measurable. The other is a strategy that uses A/B testing by deploying multiple designs and seeing which leads to better customer conversions. Alder’s razor would steer the team toward allocating their budget to the second strategy.
An idea named after its creator, mathematician Mike Alder.5
Counterpoint: Honey, did you like the movie we just watched? It felt good, yes. Away with you! Alder’s razor says don’t talk about things unless they can be settled by experiment.
4 Hanlon’s razor
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by [ignorance or incompetence].
Don’t assume bad intentions, prima facie, when someone does or says something objectionable. But consider instead if it was a mistake on their part, born of ignorance, oversight, or not knowing any better. Ignorance is the simpler explanation, malice is the more complex one.
You’re working on a project at work. The deadline is this Friday. A colleague said they’d send an email with critical information by Thursday morning. By Thursday afternoon, there’s no email from them. One explanation is that they’re intentionally trying to sabotage your project. The simpler explanation is that they forgot. Unless there’s evidence to the contrary, the simpler explanation helps maintain a constructive work environment.
Attributed to Robert J. Hanlon, though it appears in texts as old as Goethe’s from 1774.
Misunderstandings and neglect create more confusion in this world than trickery and malice. At any rate, the last two are certainly much less frequent.
—J.W. von Goethe (The Sorrows of Young Werther)
Counterpoint: A person might say something objectionable and then feign ignorance through plausible deniability when cornered. In which case, the facade of “Oh, I didn’t know any better” is by design. For more on that topic, see issue no. 16 on apophenia6 and issue no. 4 on plausible deniability.7
5 All this talk of razors
In the end, razors are tools for thinking. If these are new to you, maybe start by using them for validation. The next time you make a decision that you feel good about, refer to these and other razors and see which of them might have led you to the same decision. That might be a good way to start getting a feel for when to reach for which.
Writing 60,000 words in 22 days
I set myself a challenge on May 4, 2024 to write a manuscript that’s 60,000 words long before the end of the month. I’m at 58,000 words as of this morning, with two days to go.
Remember that video I shared a few weeks back, with ideas for how to write a book without quitting your day job? I was curious whether those rules of thumb still apply when a person has all the time in the world. Looking back on the past month, I think they do.
Constraints are helpful: I set myself an artificial constraint of May 31, 2024, which came to 22 actual days.
Build a ritual: I’d normally write for one hour a day before work. Now that I didn’t have a day job, I wrote for 3.5 hours in the morning, from 7.30 to 11 a.m., and for 3 hours in the afternoon, from 1.30 to 4.30 p.m. (The baristas and I have become besties.)
First, finish the race: I had my overall target set at 60,000 words in my text editor, and my daily target set to 3,000 words and have been focused on those two progress bars every day. I’ve made more spelling mistakes that I can count. (I’ve given up on trying to spell conscious.)
Act now: There was no time for rumination. I started right away, with a rough idea in mind for the book’s arc and its characters and their arcs. Driven by what Stephen King once said. Something to the effect of, Just write, don’t worry about how the story ends, otherwise, what’s the fun in that.
Record your ideas: I recorded voice memos in the car and dictated notes throughout the day, especially during my lunchtime walks. When you’re hyper-focused on one thing, it’s amazing how every interaction or observation triggers an idea or a memory.
Reward yourself: If the morning session had gone well, I’d get myself a chocolate pudding cake during my afternoon session. I took Sundays off to play soccer and spend time with family, and only worked mornings on Saturdays.
I’m excited about this manuscript, and can’t wait to share more with you all.
A movie you might like
I watched The Beautiful Game this past week. It’s about a group of homeless people from England, each fighting their own personal demons. They’re training for the Homeless World Cup—an international soccer tournament where teams from all across the world compete in four-a-side matches. This time, it’s happening in Rome and the team’s coach feels like they’ll finally win. But there’s more to the story than initially meets the eye.
I had no idea there even was such a tournament, nor that it’s been happening every year since 2003. I didn’t think the story was mawkishly sentimental, nor the odd cliche too distracting. Overall, an enjoyable movie.
But the Dwarf answered:
‘No; something human is dearer to me than the wealth of all the world.’
—Grimm’s Tales (by way of Joseph Conrad’s epigraph in Youth)
Until next time,
Ali
I didn’t find this anywhere online, but wanted to mention it anyway. Two decades ago, I read a line from Avicenna that could well be a razor: Any idea that comes your way, put it in the basket of possibilities, until some definitive proof rejects it.
Being open-minded means that you don’t prematurely kill new ideas that you come across or that someone brings to you. Put it into the category of things that are, for the time being, possibly true. Up and until it’s falsified by some definitive proof. If that proof is already available in existing knowledge, you can reject it outright. This approach is the basis for what we call the scientific method nowadays.
The principle is a reminder that the path to certainty starts with doubt. A mistake we sometimes make is going from certainty to certainty, by effectively starting every inquiry from a conclusion or a preconception that we then look to confirm.
One place where this principle is always useful is at the early, ideation stage of a nascent project. If you want to be creative, you need the group to feel comfortable with sharing every outrageous idea they have. So you need people in the room who are genuinely open to entertaining any idea and not prematurely analyzing it.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/implicature/#ex1
Ibid.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implicature
The Occam’s Razor counterpoint example is a little sketchy, because allowing a disease to progress in certain cases, ischemic bowel for example, is deadly. The simple explanation for abdominal pain (gas, infection, GERD, etc) needs immediate confirmation by lab and imaging tests in order to rule out emergency surgery. Time is tissue.
So I would word that counterpoint as very time-sensitive.