What is Occam’s Razor?

Question

I see this term float around the internet a lot but to this day the Google definitions have done nothing but confuse me further

EDIT: OMG I didn’t expect this post to blow up in just a few hours! Thank you all for making such clear and easy to follow explanations, and thank you for the awards!

In: 12004

Answer 1

A lot of great answers in here, but I wanted to specifically explain why it’s called a “razor”, which is a bit of an odd term. It’s because it’s a methodology that is used to “cut away” unlikely hypotheses and pare things down to just the good ones.