I read this in the Providence Journal today... found it really interesting.
So who moved Ockham’s Razor?
01:00 AM EDT on Sunday, October 7, 2007
Theodore L. Gatchel
A FEW YEARS AGO, everyone seemed to be talking about a little book called Who Moved My Cheese? I’m not worried about the cheese, but I would like to know what happened to Ockham’s Razor. If you have never heard of William of Ockham, an important philosopher from the Middle Ages, or his concept of ontological parsimony that has become known as Ockham’s Razor, don’t fret. I was 44 before I learned about them.
Unknowingly, however, I had already received a rudimentary education in the concept from an unlikely source. During the summer between my 9th and 10th grades, I worked in a service station in Algiers, La. During the weekends, I was on the night shift and worked with an elderly — at least I thought so at the time — mechanic, who became my mentor.
Apparently thinking that I had the ability to rise above simply pumping gas, he began to teach me auto mechanics. One of the first things he taught me was that if a car’s engine turned over but wouldn’t start, check to see if there was gas in the tank. Start with the simplest possible solution to the problem.
In the process of earning an engineering degree, I learned about the concept of elegance which holds that the shorter of two otherwise equally valid proofs is the better one. In postgraduate school, I was taught to apply a similar concept when writing computer programs.
The final step in my education along these lines occurred in a philosophy course in which I learned about Ockham’s Razor, which philosophers describe in terms such as “plurality is not to be posited without necessity.” A commonsense translation might be, “Of two equivalent theories or explanations, all other things being equal, the simpler one is to be preferred.”
Not everyone agrees with this approach. American cartoonist Rube Goldberg, for example, made a career of drawing the most complicated devices imaginable to accomplish the simplest of tasks. Today, college students are fond of putting Goldberg’s ideas into practice, using falling dominoes, ping-pong balls, and a variety of other everyday items in the process.
No one takes this approach seriously, however, with the possible exception of conspiracy theorists, who develop Rube-Goldberg-like theories to account for events that can be explained in much simpler terms. The attacks on 9/11 have resulted in a plethora of such theories.
To most people, the events of that day are exactly what they appeared to be and exactly what their perpetrators claim. A small group of members of al-Qaeda hijacked four airliners, crashed two of them into the World Trade Center, one into the Pentagon, and one into a field in Pennsylvania after passengers tried to regain control of the plane.
Conspiracy theorists, on the other hand, believe that the Twin Towers were brought down by explosives planted in them by the government, which also hit the Pentagon with a guided missile, and used a jet fighter to shoot down Flight 93 over Pennsylvania.
One would think that such theories could be settled by the preponderance of evidence, but the very nature of a government conspiracy makes its proponents immune to such thinking. In their view, any evidence that refutes their claims was planted by the government. When evidence to support them is missing, it was surreptitiously removed.
Ultimately, therefore, whether or not you buy into the government-conspiracy theory depends not so much on facts as on what you are willing to believe. To begin, you must believe that a significant number of government employees were willing participants in the murder of other Americans. You must also believe that the same government that has been incapable of keeping highly sensitive National Intelligence Estimates off the front pages of the nation’s newspapers is capable of keeping evidence of the worst crime in our country’s history absolutely secret.
This secrecy is important because the conspiracy involves not only the people who planned and executed the operation but thousands of others who have investigated and studied the events in detail. In the eyes of the conspiracy theorists, anyone who does not agree with them has been somehow intimidated, bribed, or otherwise coerced into supporting the government’s line.
Finally, and most importantly, you must believe that the same government that flawlessly orchestrated one of the most complex conspiracies in history was unable to carry out the relatively simple task of “finding” weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
If you can believe all that, I have an even more elaborate theory for you. The events of 9/11 took place exactly as you claim with one important exception. The conspiracy wasn’t carried out by the government, but by a small coterie of individuals in the government who hate President Bush and believed that the only way that he could be brought down was to goad him into a war that they could then sabotage. They did this in such a way that the thousands of Americans who were party to the conspiracy believed they were actually working for the government.
Do I really believe that? Of course not. Would any reasonable person believe it? I hope not. Will someone believe it? Almost certainly, which illustrates why it is so important that whoever moved Ockham’s Razor put it back immediately.
Col. Theodore L. Gatchel (USMC, Ret.), a monthly contributor, is a military historian and a professor of operations at the Naval War College. The views here are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Naval War College, the U.S. Navy, or the Department of Defense.
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Coffee