When the people involved have publicly spoken about their desire to destroy the state, wondering whether they’re actually trying to destroy the state now that they’re in a position to do so isn’t a wild conspiracy theory plucked out of empty air.
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I sense a considerable weight of assumptions behind that sentence, but there’s no point in me making assumptions about your assumptions…
In any case Occam’s Razor applies to arguments, not to knowledge. It says that, all things being equal, the simplest explanation is the most likely. It does not say that complicated explanations can’t be correct.
The aspects of quantum physics that are resolved (which is not all of them) aren’t the product of needless entity multiplication. In fact, the opposite; Heisenberg came up with his matrix mechanics precisely because classically-based theories of the atom were too complicated to fit the observed evidence. Electrons orbiting a nucleus like planets didn’t make sense with the observation that light is absorbed and emitted in discrete photons, and rather than inventing some additional mechanism to resolve that, Heisenberg suggested that thinking of position, momentum, and energy as independent classical variables was already too many entities. Treating them collectively as a matrix led to the first accurate explanation of observed spectra, and also directly led to the uncertainty principle. The uncertainty principle is weird to us as large-scale beings, but it’s not some mystical woo he pulled out of his bum while contemplating a crystal vortex in Sedona, it’s a recognition that we’re overcomplicating things when we try to fit our large-scale picture of the world onto very small scales.
I feel like this is OT though.
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I tend to agree with you that Trump isn’t as stupid as he likes to project. But somewhat more darkly, most of the conversations around Trump assume that he managed to make himself president. But maybe it wasn’t him. What if someone else made him president? To what ends?
It’s hard to be paranoid enough these days.
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A coup? What does he need a coup for? He has no institutional resistance.
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I appreciate your thoughtful response, but the problem to my mind continues to be that Occam’s Razor is always relative, and he person who throws it out in a discussion seems to always get to define what is being compared in terms of complexity, even though they have simply picked two arbitrary things to compare that help them make their point. There are a ton of other theories in physics throughout the ages that you could also choose to compare quantum mechanics to, that were much simpler explanations for how things work. But you chose to not make the comparison with those, you chose something that helps make your point. shrug
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Never agree with Louise Mensch on anything, on general principle.
NEVER. TRUST. A. TORY.
If you find yourself agreeing, be sure it will be because she has some different, ulterior motive for stating a position you agree with for entirely different reasons.
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Fuck, I am sad about that.
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That’s exactly what Berlusconi found out the hard way, the first couple of years he was in power. He came in all hot for “doing” stuff, only to discover that there are tons of procedures and regulations and resistances. The Italian administrative system is based around building relationships and sharing interests rather than directly exercising power; “work to rule” was invented by the Roman bureaucracy, it’s a form of art over there, so just telling people to obey your orders, isn’t going to work.
I expect Trump has the same authoritarian outlook. Which explains why it’s the DHS, of all people, who is playing ball - they have been a paramilitary organisation staffed by undereducated people from the very beginning, all they do is intimidate and appeal to authority day-in day-out - of course they will respond to a leader that speaks the same over-simplified language.
I hope the next 4 years will drill home the concept that US executive power post-GWB is in serious need of being explicitly curtailed. For all his achievements, Obama sorta brushed aside the problem; my speculation is that, as a scholar, he might have been a bit too awed by the system to think seriously about changing it in substantial ways. There are less charitable views. In any case, nothing was done and here we are.
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I agree on the rest of your post (keeping your nerve is important), but I can’t help pedantically pointing out that adrenaline is not there to drive cars - it’s there to make you run faster and hit better when you’re fighting a tribal war or hunting a prey over several days on 3-hours-per-night sleep. It’s absolutely normal to make bad choices while on adrenaline, because it increases your instinctual reactions (the ones you need to avoid a club to the head) not your complex thought-processes.
/end of pedantic OT.
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Occam’s Razor does require the explanation to actually explain. When you say there are tons of other theories in physics in the past that were simpler… they did not explain the phenomena we see. Occam’s Razor isn’t about “simpler is more likely to be correct, even if it doesn’t explain everything” It’s more about “If we have multiple theories that accurately account for everything, it is almost always best to go with the least complex one.” The reason bobtato must have chosen to compare classical model to quantum physics is because the classical model was the previous model that “won” in explaining phenomena over other theories. Then we observed things that showed flaws in that model, and so a new model was needed. If there is an older theory of physics that explains as much as either Quantum Mechanics, but is simpler… or explained even as much as Classical Mechanics but was simpler, then your “you chose something to help you make your point” accusation would make sense.
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Well, notice what he’s gutting and discrediting. Not congress, the people who we would expect to stop him, he’s not worried about them. They have the same interests he has. Getting anyone out of the way who wants to “fetter” the accumulation and concentration of wealth in the hands of the powerful. He’s gutting bureaucracies of management who represent those fetters. He’s discrediting the media and the courts, who will say that the things he’s doing are illegal or imoral. The TEAGOP takeover of the house was part of the coup, part of the lead-up, the prep work. He wasn’t laying the groundwork (that would be work, he also didn’t contribute to the infrastructure that laid the groundwork for successful real estate markets, he just took advantage) but, as a con-man, he certainly knew where to jump in to ride the wave, and start taking credit, and spin the momentum into a frenzy.
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Being an intellectual tool, it’s certainly easier to apply to your own thinking than to others’, especially in areas where (unlike science) people don’t or can’t fully show their reasoning. And it’s a heuristic, not an argument in itself; there’s no situation where someone could ever simply say “Occam’s Razor proves that you’re wrong”.
But if it’s just you thinking about something by yourself in a locked room, it seems hard to argue that it’s good advice. If explanation A makes three independent coin-toss assumptions, and explanation B makes just one, then A might be true, but the odds favor B.
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And again this all makes sense to me. How this applies to the original idea, that according to Occam’s Razor, we should assume all of Trump’s administrations actions are thanks to idiocy instead of a plan is beyond me, especially when they have stated their plan many times, clearly, and they are now following it. The man is President, his team and the Russians are winning, and I don’t see how explaining it all off somehow adheres to the version of Occam’s Razor you have presented here. I do appreciate your explanation, but I don’t think it terribly invalidates my point, which is that people throw the term “Occam’s Razor” around in ma y circumstances where it’s not really the appropriate filter for analysis.
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This all makes sense to me when it comes to the hard sciences, and utterly falls apart when dealing with the “social sciences,” where factors like “He really liked fuckin her” seemed to be he cause of things like, I dunno, the Trojan War. Humans are irrational silly creatures most of the time, and from what’s i observe in he world around me, simpler explanations regarding human behavior are rarely the correct ones.
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I agree that when it gets applied social situations “Occam’s Razor” is usually thrown around in a loose, sloppy way. In that respect I don’t disagree with you. I’m personally up in the air on the idiocy/plan thing, though I lean your way on it.
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Not really out of fear but out something else. I’m furry and Gay and I just got into this habit of leaving that shit out of work as I only could see the conversations getting irritating. I didn’t want to have to pull out the power point lecture to try to explain decades of what fandom culture is. I also wanted to avoid having to be a spokesperson for both gay people and furry. People here already know I’m weird I just never wanted to go down the rabbit hole with them. I don’t hate my co-workers but I don’t really want to be social with them past work.
But with the political climate change I’m nervous. I also REALLY hope to any god that is willing to listen (Hey Bast? You there? I can sacrifice kibble.) that Trump NEVER tweets out shit about furry.
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I am not so sure, bureaucratic institutions are like glaciers, slow and hard to steer.
Somehow related:
Charles Stross described the pre-Trump/Brexit world in 2013 as Beige Dictatorship, reaching the pinnacle of power some time after the USSR collapsed and The West won. He picked this up in the discussion around the announcement of avoiding trips to the US.
In his piece about the BD he was cautious optimistic about more radical political groups:
If we're lucky, emergent radical parties will break the gridlock (here in the UK that would be the SNP in Scotland, possibly UKIP in England: in the USA it might be the new party that emerges if the rupture between the Republican realists like Karl Rove and the Tea Party radicals finally goes nuclear), but within a political generation (two election terms) it'll be back to oligarchy as usual.
this changed a couple of days ago:
I'd hoped there were enough people of genuine goodwill and humanity that when the BD broke, we'd see something good come of it. The outcomes of the Brexit referendum and the US Presidential election prove that I was wrong about that; there are more utter shits (or people gullible enough to be mislead by authoritarian shitheads and racists) than there are socially-minded liberals willing to get off their arses and vote.
It tears my heart apart to admit it: I hope that Fillon will win the French presidential election (he’s a conservative shithead, but Le Pen is way out of my comfort zone. Hamon is a likeable person with, imo, sane political views but the PS is burned out and I don’t see him even near a win) and that Merkel with all her shortcomings will remain on top in the German general elections and can form a stable government (at the moment even a grand coalition with her CDU and the - normally - second large party, SPD, is unlikely according to poll results).
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And if you wait for that, you’re on fire. Metaphorically and literally.
You can’t follow a speedboat with a glacier.
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