Comment by kibwen
12 days ago
A pet peeve of mine, but this is a misapplication of Occam's razor.
Occam's razor is not to be used to say "this explanation sounds complex, there must be a simpler explanation."
Rather, the point of Occam's razor is to say "here I have two competing explanations, and they both amount to the same thing, and we don't have any evidence of one over the other, so let's just pick the simpler one because it doesn't make a difference."
So, for example, if we had absolutely zero evidence as to the domestication of horses, and one person said "they were domesticated once" and another person said "they were domesticated twice", then it all amounts to the same thing (horses were domesticated) and we have no evidence either way, so we would use Occam's razor to favor the first explanation.
But in this case, it appears we do have evidence, so rather than relying on Occam's razor, we should just argue about the evidence instead.
From Wikipedia "This philosophical razor advocates that when presented with competing hypotheses about the same prediction and both theories have equal explanatory power one should prefer the hypothesis that requires the fewest assumptions"
Both hypotheses make the same prediction and have equal explanatory power. I think just one article where they say "may have been" in the title is not enough evidence to overrule occams principle in this case.