“In mathematics, elegance is simplicity,” is a quote that more than one of my college math professors shared in my classes. Einstein has been quoted as having said that, “Everything must be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” If you are familiar with Occam’s Razor, you know that William of Occam (aka Ockham) postulated that in solving problems, “All things being equal, the simplest explanation is most likely correct.”
Although I cannot say with confidence, I suspect that something similar applies in the courtroom – the more convoluted the testimony, the more likely that it is bullshit.
Of course, there is also Hickum’s dictum – a medical aphorism that asserts that, “The patient can have as many damn diseases as he wishes.” It’s the counter argument to Occam’s razor, of course. And then there is Mencken’s aphorism that, “For every complex problem there is a solution that clear, simple, and wrong!”
Susan and I are watching the Apple+ TV series Foundation that is loosely based on Azimov’s books of the same title. The original books, written in the 1950s constituted a Trilogy. Susan has read them; I have not. Later, in a fashion not unlike Star Wars, the author added two sequels and two prequels – something that a fellow physician and Sci-Fi junkie recently pointed out to me. Tonight, I read the Wikipedia pages on this seven-book Foundation compendium. After doing so, I recalled a story titled A Canticle for Leibowitz by WM Miller.
Reviewing that Wikipedia article, it was clear that both Foundation and Canticle are post-apocalyptic dystopias in which the rebuilding of civilization depends on the preservation of knowledge. The final stories in Michael J. Straczynski’s TV series Babylon 5, “The Deconstruction of Falling Stars,” explores this same theme.
In Canticle, roving bands of disaffected seeking to destroy knowledge and civilization itself set out to murder anyone who can read as well as books (shades of Pol Pot’s Cambodian regime, Ray Bradberry’s novel Fahrenheit 451, and book banning/burning morons of any period in history from the Dark Ages to the American present.) In Canticle, the effort to eliminate knowledge and reading is called The Simplification, and the illiterate mobs that cause it, take the name The Simpletons.
As I read contemporary news stories of book banning in Florida, Texas, and other backward (mostly Southern) states, I cannot help but think of these writers of works of fiction which seem to have become a blueprint of things to come. Alas!
Our political pundits posit that Democracy here and around the world is in peril. It is, but so is civilization, I fear. 🙁