I think it’s important to be fair. Not just to people, but also to ideas. Critical thinking (of which I am a huge fan) requires that you carefully examine available information before deciding what’s “right.” (And by the way, that carries with it the requirement that contrary positions be sought out and thought through rather than simply being dismissed; if they turn out to be correct this must be incorporated and a new understanding emerges.) An honest scientist, philosopher or whatever (except for politicians; they are apparently exempt) would always say “I’ve examined as much information as I can, and this is what I believe to be true. But I could be wrong.”
But is there always merit in considering all sides equally?
I don’t think so. And let me illustrate with the pyramids. Or Stonehenge. Or the Easter Island statues. Pick one. For a long time (millennia?) we had no idea how any of these came into being. It seemed that the technology required to accomplish these feats were well beyond the culture and scientific acumen of the time. In the case of the pyramids, the sheer size of the individual stones was such that it looked like there was no possible way these could have been quarried or transported, let alone stacked up into what we see today at Giza.
Enter space aliens. One theory bouncing around a few years back was that aliens built the pyramids for reasons known only to them. (There was even a movie starring Kurt Russell called Stargate that explored that notion. As a sci-fi geek myself, I have watched it several times. Cool CGI.) If you’d rather not talk about space aliens, substitute “advanced civilizations, since lost in the mists of time” or some such flowery verbiage and you’re at the same place.
OK then.
It is a possibility, I suppose; infinitesimally small maybe, but a possibility nonetheless. But here’s the problem: there’s not a shred of hard evidence that space aliens had anything to do with building the pyramids; it’s just that up until a few years ago no one had a plausible explanation of exactly how it was done. Not knowing “how” something happened does not mean that it will never be known, or that any explanation is as good as any other. It just means “we don’t know yet.” And with our pyramids, sure enough, archeologists have identified the quarries that the stones were most likely cut from, shown how they could have been moved to the Nile (rolling them over logs), then ferried by barge to Giza where they were then rolled to the pyramid site and set into place for tourists on camels to take selfies in front of today. If you have enough slaves at hand and don’t concern yourself with little things like human suffering, it’s amazing what can be accomplished.
So on to the core of this post: when considering theories of past events, should all explanations be given equal weight? Let’s say you are hosting a conference about Stonehenge and how it might have been built. And since I’m making this up, let’s further assume that there are 10 different theories of where the stones were quarried, how they were transported to the site of Stonehenge today, etc., and you have gathered archeologists, engineers and so forth to present their theories for consideration by the audience. Do you also have to give equal time to someone who maintains that space aliens used lasers to cut the stones and a tractor beam to float them from wherever they were quarried to where they stand today? I think the obvious answer is “Of course not; that would be just silly!” Without any real evidence to support their position, the space-alien crowd would be dismissed as cranks. And justifiably so.
Occam’s law says (in current language) that the simplest answer is most likely the correct one. That’s adapted for med students today that “when you hear hoofbeats, think of horses, not zebras.” Of course there is the possibility that the patient has some weird, one-in-a-million-cases disease, but the more likely explanation is the flu. That concept loosely applies here: don’t go looking for space aliens when we don’t currently have a clear explanation.
About BigBill
Stats: Married male boomer.
Hobbies: Hiking, woodworking, reading, philosophy, good conversation.
Occam’s law and space aliens
I think it’s important to be fair. Not just to people, but also to ideas. Critical thinking (of which I am a huge fan) requires that you carefully examine available information before deciding what’s “right.” (And by the way, that carries with it the requirement that contrary positions be sought out and thought through rather than simply being dismissed; if they turn out to be correct this must be incorporated and a new understanding emerges.) An honest scientist, philosopher or whatever (except for politicians; they are apparently exempt) would always say “I’ve examined as much information as I can, and this is what I believe to be true. But I could be wrong.”
But is there always merit in considering all sides equally?
I don’t think so. And let me illustrate with the pyramids. Or Stonehenge. Or the Easter Island statues. Pick one. For a long time (millennia?) we had no idea how any of these came into being. It seemed that the technology required to accomplish these feats were well beyond the culture and scientific acumen of the time. In the case of the pyramids, the sheer size of the individual stones was such that it looked like there was no possible way these could have been quarried or transported, let alone stacked up into what we see today at Giza.
Enter space aliens. One theory bouncing around a few years back was that aliens built the pyramids for reasons known only to them. (There was even a movie starring Kurt Russell called Stargate that explored that notion. As a sci-fi geek myself, I have watched it several times. Cool CGI.) If you’d rather not talk about space aliens, substitute “advanced civilizations, since lost in the mists of time” or some such flowery verbiage and you’re at the same place.
OK then.
It is a possibility, I suppose; infinitesimally small maybe, but a possibility nonetheless. But here’s the problem: there’s not a shred of hard evidence that space aliens had anything to do with building the pyramids; it’s just that up until a few years ago no one had a plausible explanation of exactly how it was done. Not knowing “how” something happened does not mean that it will never be known, or that any explanation is as good as any other. It just means “we don’t know yet.” And with our pyramids, sure enough, archeologists have identified the quarries that the stones were most likely cut from, shown how they could have been moved to the Nile (rolling them over logs), then ferried by barge to Giza where they were then rolled to the pyramid site and set into place for tourists on camels to take selfies in front of today. If you have enough slaves at hand and don’t concern yourself with little things like human suffering, it’s amazing what can be accomplished.
So on to the core of this post: when considering theories of past events, should all explanations be given equal weight? Let’s say you are hosting a conference about Stonehenge and how it might have been built. And since I’m making this up, let’s further assume that there are 10 different theories of where the stones were quarried, how they were transported to the site of Stonehenge today, etc., and you have gathered archeologists, engineers and so forth to present their theories for consideration by the audience. Do you also have to give equal time to someone who maintains that space aliens used lasers to cut the stones and a tractor beam to float them from wherever they were quarried to where they stand today? I think the obvious answer is “Of course not; that would be just silly!” Without any real evidence to support their position, the space-alien crowd would be dismissed as cranks. And justifiably so.
Occam’s law says (in current language) that the simplest answer is most likely the correct one. That’s adapted for med students today that “when you hear hoofbeats, think of horses, not zebras.” Of course there is the possibility that the patient has some weird, one-in-a-million-cases disease, but the more likely explanation is the flu. That concept loosely applies here: don’t go looking for space aliens when we don’t currently have a clear explanation.
About BigBill
Stats: Married male boomer. Hobbies: Hiking, woodworking, reading, philosophy, good conversation.