I'd go so far as to say that Ockham's Razor doesn't say anything about whether the simplest explanation is likely to be true, but merely suggests a way of attac

I'd go so far as to say that Ockham's Razor doesn't say anything about whether the simplest explanation is likely to be true, but merely suggests a way of attacking the problem. Pick the simplest hypothesis, test it exhaustively, and if you find some data which contradicts the hypothesis then you move right on up to the simplest hypothesis that also explains the new data. There's always an infinite number of arbitrarily complex theories that can explain the data. Maybe that bump in the night was the hot water system. Maybe it was the hot water system and the boogeyman. Maybe it was the hot water system and the boogeyman riding a unicorn being chased by a liger... but these hypotheses aren't worth entertaining until we have something other than a bump. An example from my own field of planetary interiors: we've known the density and outer atmospheric composition of giant planets for quite a few years now. In the absence of anything else to go on, we tended to assume that the interior was chemically homogeneous (or maybe homogeneous plus a distinct core). But as our models and measurements improve, we get evidence that we really need a non-homogeneous model of the interior to explain everything. Does this make us stupid to have entertained homogeneous models? No, that was the right place to start, until we got evidence to the contrary.