what is Occam’s Razor?
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KISS: Keep It Simple, Stupid.
The idea is that if there are two (or more) different explanations for something and no evidence to say it’s one rather than the other, then you might as well opt for the simpler one.
An example is the solar system. For a while, there were competing ideas for how the stars and planets moved through the sky. One explanation was that the earth was orbiting around the sun and spinning, as were all the other planets, and the moon was orbiting the earth. The other theory was that everything moved in different rings around the earth. But, to explain some of the motions of some of the planets (e.g. “retrograde” motion), you needed some of the planets to go round extra loops and things. Since space travel wasn’t a thing at that point, the switch to the sun-centered explanation came because the earth-centered one was just too complicated. Even if it were correct, the maths was so hard that you were better off using the sun-centered one!
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