Living on Occam's Razor's Edge

We've fallen far enough that the answer is almost always human stupidity

Of two competing theories, the simpler explanation of an entity is to be preferred.

All things being equal, the simplest solution tends to be the best one.

Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

Depending on how you consume the world at large, something in the past two weeks made you think “what the actual hell is happening.” Whether it was the shadow coup happening by a South African tech billionaire, the Luka Dončić trade, or the TikTok ban/unban, decisions are being made by those empowered that cause more confusion than confidence.

Conspiracy theories are one of the cores of American beliefs; just mention JFK to 50 random strangers and you’ll find half of them believe something other than official record of Lee Harvey Oswald as the killer. The Dallas Mavericks are beginning a Major League-esque plan to legalize Texas gambling or move to Vegas. Elon Musk is killing USAID because the organization funded the fight to end apartheid. How many of these are true? I honestly can’t say. But the fact of the matter is, hundreds of millions believe at least one, if not all, of those statements are true. And they believe it with their chest and a Charlie from Always Sunny amount of energy.

So what is the truth? The answer is usually found by utilizing Occam’s Razor, summarized best by the quotes that began this post. As much as we’re inclined to believe a vast conspiracy of selfish, yet logical, actors orchestrate a Rube Goldberg machine of actions to achieve their goals, the truth is usually something far less interesting and far more simple. The problem is that in 2025, the other side of Occam’s Razor is most often human stupidity.

It’s not surprising that the leading cause of mistakes in a human dominated world is, in fact, humans. Up to 96% of marine accidents, 94% percent of automative accidents, and 80% of aviation accidents are caused by human error. 68% of data breaches aren’t caused by malicious hackers; they are caused by humans making mistakes. It doesn’t really matter the industry; a majority or a large portion of accidents are caused by nothing more than humans failing to be consistently perfect. It’s one of the reasons the AI boom is in fact a boom much like the gold rush; our desire to get things right leads to the want for AI, but a system trained by humans and on human created data will in fact only be as accurate as humans, aka, not 100%*.

Unfortunately, it seems that our willingness to accept that humans are fallible has morphed into full on assumptions of stupidity. What’s worse is that our assumptions are consistently proven accurate. A mega star is traded in a puzzling move by a GM who has made some shrewd moves… and also famously botched a billion dollar shoe deal and let his second best player walk away for free. An overnight “wholesome” celebrity creates her own crypto… in an obvious illegal pump and dump scheme. Travel bans are issued against perpetrators of attacks… while banning the wrong countries. It doesn’t matter if it’s sports, pop culture, politics, or your favorite artist hiding a child because she’s ashamed of the dad, people we give authority, air time, and clout are making more and more decisions where the simplest explanation is that they simply made a bad or uninformed decision.

The sad part is that while there is continued opinionated commentary on how or why this is happening, the reality is that data continues to show that Americans, on the whole, are less intelligent and think less critically since these things attempted to be quantified. This is already impacting our world via the people needed to keep it running; Jobs with low margin for error and thus require rigorous education (like nursing, technical engineers, civil engineers) all face worker shortages.

This all culminates in the reality that American trust in institutions like the government or capitalism or science or education are all at all time lows. Systems are faceless objects of our derision and criticism, but ultimately, they are comprised of many people, operating many tasks, in order to keep the institution running**. If our perception of people is that they are stupid, a thing made up of multiple stupid people must surely just as stupid, if not more!

I’m not sure where that leaves us as a country or a society. I know there is not a single magic bullet to reverse any of these sad, depressing facts. I also know that none of this has to be permanent. Learning is a lifelong journey that is far from linear. Maybe we all just need the Duolingo Owl to cyber bully us into learning about things other than French.

*I’m not going to write about AI until I have to, mostly because anything and everything about AI has already been written, by humans or otherwise.
**This is also somewhat legally codified with Citizens United, but that’s a topic for another day.