5 ms·
That isn't a razor...
by cde-v 2y ago
That isn't a razor...
- drewcoo 2y agonods to Crocodile Dundee . . .
- moffkalast 2y agoJust physicists havin' fun.
- px43 2y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_razor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_razor > In philosophy, a razor is a principle or rule of thumb that allows one to eliminate ("shave off") unlikely explanations for a phenomenon, or avoid unnecessary actions. I'd say maybe the rule here allows one to eliminate the useless parts of an explanation, thus simplifying the process of coming up with explanations for complicated things.
- cde-v 2y agoI'd say it is too reactive to be a razor as opposed to a rule that would prevent dumbing it down too far to begin with.
- GuB-42 2y agoI still wouldn't call it a razor. A razor is when you have a large number of potential explanations and want a simple rule to check if it worth further scrutiny. Occam's razor is the most famous, it says that the simplest explanation is probably the right one, Hanlon's razor is another one, it says that stupidity is more likely than malice. Here it is just a guideline "don't dumb down", but there is no simple rule that tells if a message is dumb or not. For example, in the topic of science, a razor could be "numbers without error bars are dumb". It only takes a few seconds to see or not to see error bars, so you can quickly drop the ones without to focus on those that have.
- sfink 2y agoHow so? If you have a pile of explanations, you now have a way of dividing up the pile into ones you may want to keep and ones you should discard. That way is by asking whether an expert would understand what you're talking about. Occam's Razor takes a pile of explanations and discards all those with extra assumptions or components. Feynman's discards all those that don't convey anything to an expert. I once told my son that any good story involves surprise, a relatable character, and some mention of a giant talking carrot. All of those are razors. (Some razors might be more useful than others...)
- Tao3300 2y agoWhere's the metarazor that helps us weed out what is or isn't a razor?