Prefer the simplest adequate explanation over more complex ones.
Ockham never wrote the phrase attributed to him. The razor is a tie-breaker between explanations of equal adequacy, not a preference for simple explanations over adequate ones.
In practice
- Two accounts of the outage fit every log entry; the one requiring a single failure is preferred to the one requiring three coincidences.
- The razor breaks ties between explanations of equal adequacy — it does not prefer a simple account that fails to explain the data over a complex one that succeeds.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Decision-making & Reasoning
- Essay
- Razors, rules and the tools of careful thought