Hanlon's Razor

Ever hear of Occam’s razor? It might be more properly spelled Ockham’s Razor, since it was William of Ockham who eventually gave this name to the principle, albeit centuries after his death.

The concept goes like this: if there are two competing explanations for something, the one that is less complicated is more likely to be right. The razor idea came about to imply shaving away anything extra.

This wasn’t a new idea when William started writing about it in the 14th century, but he did talk about it a lot. The concept is also called parsimony, and you might occasionally hear someone say they need to parse a large amount of information to simplify it.

You can draw an interesting parallel between this principle and the principle of entropy in physics. In the same way that matter has a lot more disordered states than ordered states, Occam’s razor states that things are generally explained far better without invoking additional complexity.

While Occam’s razor is useful, there are specifi…