Who Dunnit?
“I think someone tried to get into the neighbor’s house”, my husband said.
“What’d you mean? How do you know? Is anything missing?”
“I don’t know yet. The garage door is partially open. When’d you last check their house?”
“Yesterday.”
This was bad.
Our neighbors left several weeks previous and we’d promised to keep watch. This wasn’t a phone call I was looking forward to making.
I pulled on my shoes, grabbed the key and together we went over to the house. Ducking under the partially opened garage door, we looked around. Who’d left it open? And why?
The paint and tools were still there. Nothing was destroyed. There were berries like the ones on the front hedge scattered across the floor like a miniature milky way.
That hadn’t been there yesterday.
The door between the garage and the house is always unlocked, but I ducked back outside and went to the front door to check it.
“There’s a dead grouse here”, I called to my husband.
It was lying, still warm, on the covered walkway that led to the front entrance.
“Poor thing”, he said, “I’ll put it in the garbage”.
“You have to come with me first”, I said unlocking the front door.
My imagination went into overdrive.
What if people are still inside? They might be lurking in a closet. With an axe. Or a gun. They’d already murdered a grouse and left it for dead. Maybe someone’s hiding from the law. Or the mob is taking over the house.
Should we call the police?
We checked everywhere. Basement, bedrooms,cupboards and closets. Nothing.
They must have been scared away, I said. We’d better check all the doors and windows to make sure they didn’t unlock them with the intention of coming back after dark. Again nothing. Everything was locked tight.
As we swept the berries out of the garage, I pointed to the second garage door.
“That one’s locked.
It looks like Ben and Sarah forgot to lock this one before they left. That’s why the intruders were able to lift it.”
The doors operate on a spring system. I pulled the rope to lower the door and locked it in place.
Who did it? And why?
Occam’s Razor to the rescue
William of Ockham, a Franciscan Friar and philosopher who lived in the 14th century, fashioned this useful razor.
Occam’s Razor is a problem solving principle. A heuristic or rule of thumb that helps us ‘shave’ off unlikely explanations. Removing the stubble that hazes judgement.
It is futile to do with more what can be done with fewer.
William of Ockham
This principle, also called the Law of Parsimony, gives preference to the simplest solution. It’s not fail proof but it’s a decision making tool that’s useful across disciplines. Scientific inquiry, medicine, criminology to name a few. If you’re interested in studying how it’s applied in these disciplines, I’ll leave a few links from my reading at the end.
For the love of story
People love stories. We love to hear them and we love to tell them. Stories are in our DNA. Combine this with the brain’s bias to the negative and you quickly realize why we need Occam’s Razor.
Whether they’re aware of using it or not, Occam’s Razor is the reason teachers don’t believe students when they say the dog ate their homework. Although, I did have a dog pee on my paper once. Just walked right over, lifted his leg and let loose. I stopped sitting on the floor to write my papers.
Imaginations gone wild
An overactive imagination is debilitating. It’s important to recognize when it’s happening. Again because we love story, we often don’t recognize that it’s happening until we’re a long way down the rabbit hole. It may appear harmless. Until it consumes your thoughts and starts an avalanche of worry and stress.
Why haven’t they texted me back? Are they okay? Oh no, something terrible has happened.
Or we do an internet search on our symptoms and before long, we have a very rare disease.
Whenever you find yourself filling in the blanks with elaborate details or attributing motive, you’re spinning a tale. Conspiracy theories is the imagination in hyper-drive.
Occam’s Razor cuts that away so you consider only what’s before you. Enabling the simplest conclusion.
Our brain loves novelty.
And it loves to look for answers. If we’re not careful, it will happily fill in the gaps. Like it does with the visual information we gather from our surroundings . But while some of that information is based on prior knowledge or experience, it’s often unreliable. Our brain also draws from TV and movies and sensationalized news stories.
Applying Occam’s Razor ensures the number of moving parts don’t exceed the facts. For when that happens, imagination has gone rogue.
You gave too much rein to your imagination. Imagination is a good servant, and a bad master. The simplest explanation is always the most likely.”
Agatha Christie
Our first instinct was to blame a human intruder.
And this was a plausible starting point. But in the absence of facts, my imagination worked overtime to fill in the gaps. By the time we checked the house, I had concocted a narrative worthy of a novel. But alas, there was no evidence beyond the lifted garage door and the berries.
How to use the razor
- This tool isn’t used to prove anything.
- It’s not meant to pare away complex ideas or facts.
- Use it to think simply though not simplistically.
- Draw the most logical conclusion given the facts.
The grouse did it.
Applying Occam’s Razor to the facts, the most obvious suspect was the grouse.
Whether it was being chased or whether it was drunk on the berries, we don’t know. We believe it flew into the door with sufficient force, hitting it in just the right place to activate the spring system, causing the unlocked door to partially lift.
It was a windy day. The berries that the bird harvested from the hedge, fell out of its mouth on impact and blew into the garage. Dazed the bird made it’s way to the covered porch where it died of its injuries.
It’s not a simplistic explanation.
There’s physics involved after all. But it is the most simple explanation. And it takes into account all the evidence. It happened that morning. Door partially open. Berries on the garage floor. The dead grouse. The spring loaded garage opening system.
We didn’t call the police.
The poor culprit was dead.
Carry Occam’s Razor in your back pocket
Equip your kids, your students, your grandkids. Teach them how to apply it to everyday situations. Show them how to use it to manage stress and worry caused by an over-active imagination. And how to determine the difference between conspiracy and story and plausibility With practice they will learn to cut through the superfluous and make their own judgement based on the facts before them.
Occam’s Razor is a time-honoured principle worth knowing.
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Simply . . .
P.S. Here’s an additional resource. Enjoy!
The Tyranny of Simple Explanations by Philip Ball
~ Priscilla