Occam's Razor: The Atomic Mental Model - Sketchy Ideas %
updated 4mo ago
updated 4mo ago
As Einstein said, everything should be made “as simple and as few as possible.”36 This principle is known as Occam’s razor. The name, I admit, is unfortunate. It sounds like a cheap late-night horror flick, but it’s actually a mental model named after William of Ockham, a fourteenth-century philosopher. The model is often stated as a rule: The simp
... See moreOccam’s razor cuts through the clutter that often gets in the way of first-principles thinking. The most elegant theories rest on the fewest assumptions. The most elegant solutions, the rocket scientist David Murray writes, “use the least number of components to solve the greatest number of problems.”
Simpler explanations are more likely to be true than complicated ones. This is the essence of Occam’s Razor, a classic principle of logic and problem-solving. Instead of wasting your time trying to disprove complex scenarios, you can make decisions more confidently by basing them on the explanation that has the fewest moving parts.