10 Philosophical Razors to Sharpen Your Thinking and Cut Through the Noise

During their recent episode, Taylor, Carlisle, and Joshua Young discussed 10 Philosophical Razors to Sharpen Your Thinking and Cut Through the Noise. Here’s an excerpt from the episode:

Jake: Yes, sir. Today, we’re going to be discussing philosophical razors. And so, we’ll start out by saying–

Tobias: Occam’s.?

Jake: So, that’s going to be number one. But let’s not bury the lead, Toby.

Tobias: Sorry. Sorry.

Jake: So, have you ever found yourself stuck in a debate, tangled in a web of confusion, overwhelmed by the complexities of life? And is it me, or does it seem like there actually is a lot more bullshit in the world these days that you have to sort through?

Today, we’re going to be sharpening our minds with some powerful intellectual tools, which we’ll call philosophical razors. These 10 principles, if you will, help us slice through the nonsense, avoid logic traps, and ideally, at the end of the day, make better decisions. So, let’s kick things off with Toby’s favorite, Occam’s razor, the most famous.

William of Ockham was a 14th century Franciscan friar, logician and theologian. He often found himself in trouble with the church, because he had these radical ideas about simplicity and philosophy and theology. And sometimes they say that like every profession is a conspiracy against the laity. When you try to make things too simple, that’s why all the religious stuff was written in Latin. So, he was forced to flee Bavaria and then he spent his later years writing. And so, his principle, as everybody already knows, is–

Tobias: Can I have a go, see if I can remember it? So, I think it should be stated as prefer the explanation that assumes the least.

Jake: Sure?

Tobias: Give me the–

Jake: Well, I’m not giving his exact writing here. I’m translating it. But the simplest answer is likely the correct one.

Tobias: You didn’t read it in the original Latin, JT?

Jake: Yeah, exactly. [Jake laughs] So, let’s just do a little example. Picture this. Your TV suddenly stops working. The reason, it’s unplugged or maybe the power’s out or wait for it, the government has hacked into your living room to make sure that you’re not watching the wrong news source. Now, which of these seems more likely? Probably, the simplest explanation is usually the correct one. And Occam’s razor reminds us not to overcomplicate things.

So, let’s go to number two. This is Hanlon’s razor. That is, never attribute to malice that which can adequately be explained by stupidity. Unlike most philosophers on our list, Hanlon wasn’t a famous academic, he wasn’t a scientist. He was an ordinary guy who submitted this phrase to a joke book in the 1980s, and apparently, it stuck. It’s actually gained worldwide recognition. It’s often compared to Napoleon had said at one point that, “Incompetence is more common than conspiracy.” It pretty much rhymes with that.

I think also one’s a little bit reminded there of the fundamental attribution error from psychology, which is that we often judge others harshly based on their actions without taking into account the situation that they’re in. When it’s us, when we’re the ones who mess up, it was the circumstances it’s not that we’re a bad person. So, next time, someone cuts you off in traffic, maybe they’re just distracted and they’re not like a supreme A hole.

Next up is Hitchen’s razor, “What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.” Christopher Hitchens was a journalist, intellectual, fierce debater, actually pretty clever, funny guy to listen argue with people, if you like that kind of thing. He spent most of his career challenging political propaganda, religious dogma, and arguing that extraordinary claims require strong evidence. This is really a skepticisms razor.

So, imagine that Toby tells us that he has a pet dragon in his garage and we asked to see it. He says, “Oh, it’s invisible.” Well, according to Hitchen’s razor, we don’t need to waste our time just proving that there’s not a dragon in there, because he hasn’t really given us much evidence. We can just move on. So, no evidence, no belief, big time saver.

Closely related to that is Popper’s falsifiability principle, which is basically for a theory to be truly scientific, it has to be falsifiable. So, Popper was an Austrian-British philosopher of science. He was frustrated at the time by the way that Marxist theories and Freudian psychology could twist any outcome to fit their claims. And so, he sought a clear way to distinguish real science from, what he called, pseudoscience. His solution was falsifiability.

So, basically, if it can’t be tested and potentially proven wrong, it’s not science, it’s pseudoscience. So, for instance, the claim that crystals heal diseases, let’s say, how do we test that? We can’t. So, it isn’t really much of a scientific claim. I’ll leave placebo effect out of that for now.

All right. Next up is Sagan’s standard, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” This is related to Hitchen’s razor. But Carl Sagan was a renowned astrophysicist, science communicator, author all around pretty awesome guy. He spent his career promoting critical thinking and scientific skepticism. Let’s say that if Toby tells us that he saw a UFO, should we believe him based on some blurry photo? Sagan would say no. If the claim is very extraordinary, then we need the evidence to be just as impressive.

Next up, Brandolini’s law. This is the bullshit asymmetry principle. Alberto Brandolini was an Italian programmer, and he coined this principle in 2013 after seeing how easily misinformation spreads online. So, he recognized the struggle of fighting falsehoods in an era of rapid digital communication. Really misinformation is the hydra of the internet, like cut off one head and two more grow in its place. So, I think in AI world, now with generated content that we’re going into, I think this is going to go into overdrive. Honestly, I’m not really sure what we do about that. [chuckles]

Next up is Goodhart’s law. This is when a measure becomes a target, it fails. Charles Goodhart was a British economist. He worked with the Bank of England. He observed that when people manipulate metrics to meet goals, the metric itself starts to lose meaning. So, when numbers– [crosstalk]

Tobias: Inflation.

Jake: Yeah, exactly. [chuckles] Dot plots, whatever. So, at one-point in India, there was a policy aimed to reduce the cobra population during the British rule, and they paid people for each dead snake. Well, it backfired when people began breeding the cobras to collect this bounty. And then, ultimately, it led to an increase in the cobra population. Once the program was discontinued and everyone just released all the cobras that they’d farmed. Oh, man. Basically, that’s government intervention in a nutshell.

All right. Next up, Sturgeon’s Law, which states that 90% of everything is crap. Theodore Sturgeon was a science fiction writer who noticed that while most things in any field are mediocre, there’s always a few shining examples of something that’s excellent. So, most movies, most books, most TV shows, they’re pretty mediocre. And 90% of it is crap, but the remaining 10% is pure gold. And so, we want to be selective.

Next up is Tesler’s Law. T-E-S-L-E-R. This is that complexity is conserved. Larry Tesler was a pioneering computer scientist. He worked at Xerox, Parc, P-A-R-C, and Apple. He was passionate about making computers more user friendly. He even coined the term user interface. So, his law states that making things simple for users increases the complexity behind the scenes.

So, think about your smartphone. A toddler can use it and scroll through and do all amazing things, it’s so intuitive. But behind the scenes of that slick interface is this labyrinth of extreme engineering hardware, complicated coding. So, you can’t really hide it. I think risk is also– I’ve heard Corey Hoffstein talk about this quite a bit, that “Risk can’t really be destroyed. It can only be transmogrified or moved or converted into some other form.” I think the same thing is true of complexity.

Perhaps, the funniest one that we’re going to wrap up with is Cunningham’s Law, which is the best way to get the right answer is to post the wrong one on the internet. Ward Cunningham was an American programmer. He created the first wiki, which laid the foundation later for Wikipedia. He noticed that people correct misinformation more eagerly than they provide correct information when they’re unprompted. So, if you post that Toronto is the capital of Canada online, within seconds, people will rush to correct you that that’s not correct. So, weird but very effective way to get information.

So, in conclusion, these philosophical razors are tools to help you sharpen your thinking, avoid logical traps and perhaps, clear up some confusion and use these principles to stay clear headed when possible, and handle misinformation, extraordinary claims, complex decisions in a world that’s increasingly full of bullshit.

Tobias: Good one, JT. How did you find that list of razors?

Jake: I asked the ChatGPT gods to help me fill out. I knew several of them, but they help for mapping out the space quite well.

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