It's Josh coming back at you hot with our twenty eighteen joint on Ockham's razor, one of the more semi understood scientific principles, but it's also probably the most widely used of them, all too or misused. I guess I should say we have a medieval monk who became one of the early proto scientists to thank for Ockham's razor, which makes him a hero to science. And here's our episode on that hero. Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from HowStuffWorks dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and there's guest producer Tristan over there. So it's stuff you should Know.
I don't know how these are going to release, but as you've noticed, Tristan weirdly grew out his mustache in the last hour.
Again, he's quick, he's very past.
He can make it go in and out, in and out.
What is that.
It's like he's growing his mustache and it's sucking it back in. Oh, okay, sucking it back in. No, No, like a reverse Plato. Right, do you remember that Plato set with the.
Like a little meat grinder.
No, there was one where like you could grow a mustache on it, dude.
Correctly, I think I remember that.
Yeah, but imagine if you could reverse it too.
It was called the Plato Nightmare set.
Yeah. Is that your nightmare? Growing a Plato mustache? Waking up like that?
Yeah, I've had that dream about once a week for about thirty five years.
Like all the rest of you is chuck, but just your mustache is Wallace and Grommet.
Yeah, dude.
Yesterday, I uh, there was a bad smell. Emily and I were having a glass of wine at a wine bar. There was a bad smell nearby. I think it was a dumpster or something, and they were growing fresh herbs at the wine bar, and I rubbed a rosemary bush and then swiped it all over my mustache. And Emily's mind was blown. She was just like, oh my god, Like I can't believe, Like that's an actual use for facial hair.
Yeah, I guess it just to.
Hold in that smell. It was like, well, you can wipe it on your upper lip. It's probably the same thing. Sure, maybe the hair retains more.
Essential oils. I don't know, maybe which essential oils. Man, people are clamoring for that episode.
Yeah, we should do that.
We will eventually.
It's been a big part of my life for ten and twelve years.
Now, Essential Oils. We'll talk about it someday, but not today.
No, no, because Chuck's gonna stumble through a philosophy podcast.
It's a yeah, I guess it is philosophy. It's the philosophy of knowledge. Epistemology is another way to put it. But specifically, Chuck, we're talking today about a little ditty you may have heard of before called OCAM's razor.
Called the Gambler?
Have you? Have you ever you've heard of Okham's razor before?
Right, Well, so much so that I thought for sure we had covered this, But I realized that we just talked about it quite a bit in the Uh Scientific Method episode.
I'm not at all surprised because a lot of people say that the basis of science, which is how humans approach nature in our universe and us and everything scientifically, the basis of that is Ocham's razor. And if Okam's razor sounds familiar but you can't quite place it, you've probably heard it as something like given two possible outcomes or explanations or whatever. The simplest version is probably the right one.
Yeah, it's a pretty even that in its simplicity is beautiful. The mere statement itself is an example of its simplicity and how wonderful can be just to think, like, yeah, you know what, let's get through all the gobbledygook. I think the easiest way to explain this. Whether it's a A H A A what do you call the orb in a photos?
Yeah, it's not.
It's not your great grandfather coming to visit you on a different plane. It's really just an error with your photographs.
It's the flash, yeah, reflecting off a like water vapor in the air.
Or Kennedy probably acted alone.
Kennedy he shot himself from Afar.
Yeah, I clearly meant to say Oswald acted alone, because that is the simplest explanation, not this very convoluted, deep plot that goes that one hundred people were involved in to assassinate Kennedy.
So we'll talk about all that because it's a teaser. What you're doing right now is has become pretty standard. You're using Okham's razor to disprove other people's points.
Yeah, there's this is.
A total and complete misuse of Okham's razors not the original intention. The original intention had nothing to do with saying that's wrong. It is just a heuristic device, a guide, a rule of thumb that tells you that, because things tend to be more simple in the universe, if you if you're doing something, don't make it harder than it has to be. Don't add more to it than is
needed to get the job done. And there's actually a couple of ways to put this, and both of them get attributed to William of Ockham, who will talk about in a second.
Yeah, Billy Ockham.
But one is called he sounds like a baseball manager.
Yeah.
But one is called the principle of plurality.
Yeah.
Harder to say fast than you would think it is, And that is translated from the Latin plurality should not be positive without necessity. And the other is the principle of parsimony, which is it is pointless to do with more what is done with less. From what I understand, they are one and the same. Oh really, I could
not find anyone who could explain the difference. And I see them interchangeably, not just like on some dude's blog, but I'm like, you know, it's the Internet Encyclopedia philosophy or the Stanford Encyclopedia philosophy, Like they don't seem to be different.
Well, parsimony, it seems different to me because that specifically is like not using resources, not spending money if you don't have to. And that seems different than plurality.
Okay, well then then let's explore it. So plurality adding to something, doubling something, maybe just making it more than just the singular. He's saying plurality should not be positive without necessity. Right, So I guess what he's saying. Then if they are different, then if you're if you're guessing at something, if you're trying to explain something, don't make it harder than it is, don't make it bigger than is absolutely necessary to explain it.
Yeah, that makes sense.
Or and this is a really big point that we'll see in a minute. William of Occam really was saying, don't don't add on to something beyond what you know to be true and correct, which a lot of people over time, and I think he actually maybe explicitly was an impirsist have said William of Ockham was an Impisis. He was saying that you need to experience things through your senses to know that they are true.
Yes, empirical evidence if I can look at it or smell it, or taste it or feel it.
What's the fifth one?
Uh, tickle it, tickle it.
And then the sixth one, of course we know means Bruce Willis is really dead.
See the ghost of it.
Yeah, if there is no empirical evidence, if you cannot experience it with one of your senses, then.
It's it's poo pooed.
So so it is so. And those two things, like you really especially modern science, especially science these days, you put them together. It's given two things. Go with the simpler explanation, and you don't don't believe anything that you can't sense one way or another through your sensus empirically. Right, you put those together, you have the basis for modern science.
And so the idea that that that things that are simpler are better, or the idea that the universe is simpler, Like when you start to think about it, it's all over the place, right, Like the the idea that the universe is based on simpler being better is found everywhere. Right, So, like there's things that things have fewer parts, things that require less energy, the encapsulation of larger ideas into smaller amounts of words or theories or whatever. All these things
are very much prized by humanity. So it just kind of makes sense that Okham's razor is a sensible thing and that you could actually use it to uncover the mysteries of the universe. Yeah, but again, that's not really necessarily the case, to tell you the truth.
No, I mean, there's there's gonna be a lot of uh and and this stuff is kind of fun, just a lot of back and forth on Occam's razor throughout this whole thing, because there is no its and that's kind of part of the whole jam of Ockham's raiser is there is no right or wrong here, right.
You know what's weird is that? Right?
A lot of people point to it though that it's oh this is right. I just proved you wrong and that's just not true. Man.
All right, should we take a break early?
Okay?
Yeah, I think we should take a break.
Now because I need to get my head wrapped around this and we'll come back getting the way back machine and visit Billy Ockham.
Okay, so now Billy Ockham sounds like a nineteen eighties recording star. Oh sure, like Billy Ocean.
Yeah, get off of my razor and get into my car.
Was this so we should say the razor too. It's a philosophical term, so term of philosophy, the razor used to scrape away unnecessary stuff. So it's Okham's razor. So let's go back and meet Billy Ockham, shall we.
Yeah.
And you wrote this by the way back in your in your article writing Days, and you point out very Astutelee, that this is from a time in our history of the world where you might not have had a surname. You may have been William of Ocham, which is the
case here, which is in England. And he lived between about twelve eighty five and thirteen forty nine, and he was a philosophical dude and a Franciscan monk, and he very much like you point out, took his valid poverty very seriously and lived a very meager, humble life.
Yeah he did. He also expected the church to take the same vow Potterphy, and he actually butted heads with the church quite a bit, so much so that he ended up getting excommunicated, as we'll see, but he was the real deal as far as like a true believer went. The weird thing about William of Ocham was that he was also a genuinely independent theeker and a rationalist, which at the time rationalism and the church did not go hand in hand. They were there was really not much rationalism.
So for an idea, the idea for this this upstart Franciscan monk to start questioning the ideas of the church, and not only that, but how the leaders of the church conducted themselves, and how much money they surrounded themselves with, and how much power they had politically. This is it was a big deal, right.
Yeah, And he is not.
He did not invent this line of thought as much as he's probably attributed to this to people that just know him from like a jeopardy board. This is already a line of thought well established by this time in the medieval times, and he was just he kind of boiled it down to those two sentences that you were talking about so anyone could understand it. He could put it on a bumper sticker and a T shirt and sell it, right.
So it was Aristotle who was the guy who came up with this idea first, that simplicity equals perfection, and perfection equals simplicity. Said, the more perfect a nature is, the fewer means it requires for its operation.
Right.
I love that, So that makes sense.
That speaks to me.
But then over time, in between Aristotle and William it kind of got expanded. So let me give you an example of that same thought from Robert gross Test who was an early scientist also a theologian I believe too. Here is his version of it that is better and
more valuable, which requires fewer other circumstances being equal. For if one thing we're demonstrated from many in another thing from fewer equally known premises, clearly that is better, which is from fewer because it makes us know quickly, just as a universal demonstration is better than particular because it
produces knowledge from fewer premises. That similarly, in natural science, in moral science, and in metaphysics, the best is that which needs no premises, and that better that which needs the fewer other circumstances being equal.
Boy, the ironies there are rich.
Right. So within less than one hundred years, William of Auckham comes along, and he's just like plurality should not be positive without necessity, Robert.
Yeah, And Robert was like, well, yeah, I guess that's one way you could say it.
So I want to say something though, before we keep going, Chuck, I actually found a correction of my own article, oh that I missed before.
What's that?
It turns out that they think now that another theologian slash scientist from William of Ockham's era named John Dunn scottis was the one who really encapsulated this principle of plurality and principle of parsimony, and that it was a guy from the nineteenth century, William Rowan Hamilton, a British mathematician, that he was the one who misattributed it to William of Ockham.
So is William of Aukham just a a know nothing, No, No, His writings definitely included this stuff, and he never took credit for this, Okay, But they think think that it was actually John's done.
Scott is who who encapsulated it the way that we tend to think of it now.
So he's sold the bumper stickers.
But right, But William Levacam thought this way, and he was a radical thinker and a rationalist, as we'll.
See, right, and like you kind of teased out earlier, he did butt heads with the church over this. He wrote a lot about it, and the church was not into it, and Pope John the what is that twenty second? They kind of squared off on this, and of course the Pope wins all battles, at least back then, and he was excommunicated in several of his his monk brothers and I take that to mean not real brothers, right right, were excommunicated. In thirteen twenty eight, he went to Munich
seeking refuge. He was protected there by Emperor Louis the fourth, and ultimately he went out because he started right about Pope John the twenty second, saying he's a heretic, and people ultimately believed him.
Right.
He definitely made some pretty convincing points. And he also again, like if you're saying I took a vout poverty, the church really should too. And the church isn't poverty stricken and you are. It gives you a little more credibility from the outside as well. Sure, so there's some reasons why William of Waucam is this theologian, a devout Franciscan Monk is looked upon as one of the fathers of Western science, like the foundation of Western science right, or
science in general. And the reason why is he argued against the prevailing ideas at the time, which is called medieval synthesis. And this is very much championed by Thomas Aquinas, who's a famous theologian. I believe he was a saint and one of the reasons he was canonized was because of this. Thinking about this, But the whole medieval synthesis
thing was that God was first and foremost everything. Right, you were a member of the church just as much as you were a member of your country, a citizen of your country. All human knowledge came from God, and Thomas Aquinas it wasn't just like the end. Thomas Aquinas used philosophy to prove that sentiment that all human knowledge
came from God, and here is how. And basically it took the idea of cause and effect and said that you can trace every effect back to a cause, back to another effect, back to another cause, but ultimately you were going to end up on God, and that all of our conceptions of everything arose from God's conception, and that God willed that we understand things this way, which means that this is the perfect way to understand it, which means it's right right. So that is not what
William Wackam thought. He was again a rationalist who said, no, we tend to think things are things because that arises in the human mind from cognition, not from God. And this dude was not a heretic. He believed that you didn't apply rationalism to God, that God required faith, sure, and rationalism stood on its own it was a different thing. And you couldn't know God through your senses. God was elsewhere.
Leave God out of this. And the fact that he was able to really successfully lay like a philosophical groundwork for this, a rational groundwork for it's one thing today to be like I'm a secular humanist, you know, I'm rational to forget the church that's today. This is at a time when this guy is saying this and the church has the power to burn you at the stake. Like he was a stand up rational thinker, right, which kind of makes him a hero of rationality today. But don't.
And this is another perfect example of how Accam's razor gets confused. Accam himself gets confused too, he's a hero of science, but it was also one of the more devout human beings walking the earth at the time. It was a monk for basically his whole life.
And also had a metal band called Medieval Synthesis.
Oh that is a good name, isn't it.
So he was just a conundrum.
Yeah, he was a conundrum for sure. And again he got excommunicated. He had to escape by horse stolen horse. Oh, I mean he was not very monk like.
No, But all right, So.
We were talking earlier about empirical evidence and how that kind of fits in here, and the fact that if you can't you know, like, you know the sky is blue because you look up and you see it's blue. You know a bird makes a whistle because you can hear the bird make a whistle.
So it's very easy to sort of use.
That and say sure, but if you don't, if you can't see it or hear it empirically or any of the senses experience it, it's very easy to poo poo. And you give a great example here with Lorenz and Einstein and kind of which one would win out. So both of these guys, both physicists, Einstein obviously more popular
will see. For a very important reason. They both had the conclusion mathematically that with the space time continuum, the closer we get to moving at the speed of light, the more we slow down, which is hard to wrap your head around. So Lorenz comes out and says, explains it away because of changes that take place in the ether, which he might as well have said, a bit of magic happens. Einstein didn't, and so the one we talk
about today is Einstein and not Lorenz. That explanation of Einstein was more rooted in science, and he didn't say something wacky like the ether, which is something empirically you can't see or smell or taste. So Einstein, you know, he won that great battle.
Yeah, he very famously said, He goes, I don't know what's what, but I know it ain't got nothing to do with no ether.
My brain's gonna end up in a jar in some guy's garage in New Jersey, right.
And everybody will love that picture of me with my tongue sticking.
Out, and Walter Mattho will play me in a romantic comedy.
So Laurence violated that principle of plurality. Right. He added something to this that required an additional basically like a leap of faith. There was no empirical evidence that there was such a thing as the ether.
And he said, did I say ether? And I didn't mean ether? And never went no, no, no to.
You, late Laurent.
Well we heard you, buddy.
And he's still I mean, he's a respected he's a respected physicist.
Still.
It's not like he was some crackpot or anything like that, because if you put his equations in Einstein's equations side by side, they came to the same conclusions. It was just explaining how Lorenz seems to have misstepped right, right, But he was obviously at least as brilliant as Einstein. When it comes to that, he's just a little nuts apparently. So he violates the principle of plurality. And now we understand relativity rather than Lorenz's manic raven Yeah.
And I don't believe we mentioned there's a word for that. If you can't prove it empirically, it doesn't exist. It's called positivism. Yes, positivism isn't about having a good.
Attitude, right, and so this is and this also happened during Einstein's working days too. There was a guy named Ernest Mack, and Ernest Mock was so Ernst Mack, thank you. Yeah, that's that's way better than Ernest. Ernst Mock. He was so nuts on empiricism. He was a he was an early I think he was a physicist, if not a mathematician, one of the two. And he he basically said, like, molecules don't exist. All this whole bubble over molecules and atoms and all this stuff, you're all crazy. We can't
see him. They don't exist. So there's a there's this kind of ironic twist that came from Einstein's working career where he actually he beat Lorenz, his rival, to this theory through this through Okham's raiser. But he also disproved this idea of that Ernest Mock, this thing about only believing what you can sense with your your senses, this kind of other part of Okham's razor, in a subsequent paper that came a few years later that showed that
molecules do exist. So the idea that that OCAM's razor can be used both ways is something that just keeps coming up again and again and again. And we'll we'll talk about how after a break. How about that? Okay, Chuck, So, who who uses Okham's raiser? Obviously everyone who was throwing money down on the cockfight between Lorentz and Einstein were using Okaham's rais? Were they all went with Einstein's because this was the simplest.
Right, Yeah?
Who else uses it?
Well?
I mean you have a great section in this article about skeptics, and I know over the years of the show, over the past ten years, we've had a lot of minor scraps with the skeptic community.
That's a pretty minor Is that fair to say?
Yeah, because I mean we have our skeptical side for sure, but they're you know, when it comes to skepticism and skeptics, it's sort of on a sliding scale. There's a range of how you might feel about certain things, and you very astutely, i think, point out that if you are a true skeptic, then you will not use Akham's raiser like I did earlier as a tool to disprove something right, that you will only use it as a tool to consider different explanations. And that's there's a big difference there.
There is so like like that whole idea of seeing a ghost on film. Right, So there there's there's this example where somebody could say, so you just explained something about light and refracting and something with the film and there was moisture in the air. What's Isn't it just simpler to say, no, that was a ghost exactly. And in that case, if you were a skeptic, you would you would you're you pull a little tuft of your hair out, maybe just start scraping at your cheeks until
you bleed. Uh. Ideally, what you would say is I get what you're saying, but you're bringing something into this that we don't know exists. Like we do know light exists, we do know it refracts off of vapor, we do know how this can be captured on film. So yes, that sounds very complicated. But the the ghosts don't exist as far as we know. We can't send the empirically. But I would keep my mind open to the idea
that ghosts could consumably exist. The fact that I just showed that this is reflect the reflection of light off of water vapor in this graveyard does not mean that your hypothesis about ghosts existing is wrong. It just means that's what's in this picture? Right, that's a true skeptic.
Right, because because things happen and they can later on, the more fantastical explanation could.
Be true and has been true. Uh. And you point out very.
Very plainly here that there's a couple of problems with this, and to me, this kind of says it all, is that it's subjective. Like the whole notion of determining is this is the most simple explanation is completely subjective because the ghost explanation, one person might say, no, the ghost explanation is clearly the simplest because I can just say one word ghost, see there, and then you could fire
right back. Well know, I can fire back two words photographic mishap, right, or maybe just mishapp Yeah, if they want to keep it completely equal, And that's the most simple. So it's completely subjective as to which one or anything that it's the most simple.
Right exactly. And then again the idea that you can use Acam's razor to disprove something just by showing that that it's not the simplest explanation, that doesn't that's not correct, that's not right, And so scientists will use Occam's razor and all sorts of different disciplines like for example, if you're making an artificial neural network, right, like a learning machine, you might use decision trees, and you will use some sort of simple decision tree over a more complicated one
that can get the same job done. That doesn't mean that it's necessarily the right one, but there are demonstrably good reasons for picking a simpler one over. It's less likely to break, it takes less time, it takes less energy to come to the computations. There are things that are valuable about it, but it doesn't mean that the
other one is just wrong. And again, when you're using Okham's razors, say, if you're making a neural network, or you're pouring through a data set or something like that, or you're trying to interpret a big data set, yeah, you're making again like you're saying, not just a subjective judgment about what's simpler. But that's all there is to it. You're making a subjective judgment about what's simpler, not what's right.
It's not saying what's right. And this is a recurring theme that you just have to know because there's so many people out there that use Okham's razor to disprove other people's ideas, and that's just not at all what it was originally intended for. It's just a complete perversion of it and it's just wrong, and that's not how science works. So if you see somebody out there doing this, thump them in the forehead.
Yeah and boy, then when you get into the outle it gets really interesting because this is sort of a prime example of the simplest explanation from a believer's point of view, is very easy to say, No, the Big Bang is incredibly complex and complicated, and it's pretty clear that the easiest explanation here and the simplest thing is God created life in seven days, right, But that's also discounting the process that it took God to create Earth, if that's what you believe, and just kind of bundle
it up in a tidy package, say God created life. The Big Bang is super complicated, so and very coincidental if you really look at it. So this is the simplest explanation, Okham Trazer proofs that God.
Exists, right, And so that's been used time and time again by creationists, right, or people who believe in ghosts are people who counter empiricism in a lot of ways. Right, Yeah, But on the other hand, you can you can find atheists to use OCAM's razor to show that God does not exist, because their point is if the universe tends towards simplicity and God is perfect and simplicity is perfection, then if God existed, the universe would be a lot
more simpler. There wouldn't be this big bang thing that we have that happen it would You would be right creationists, and the fact that you're wrong means that means that there is no God, which is just like, my head's starting to spin a little bit with this, But it's a good example of how you can use OCAM's razor. Both sides can use OCAM's razor to disprove the other person's point, which against it shows how it's not meant to be used that way.
Well yeah, and then you point out too and talk about a headspinner like something like photosynthesis is a pretty complex mechanism in nature. But I mean, who's to say that that isn't the simplest way to achieve food production in a plant. Maybe that is the simplest.
Yeah, we have no way of knowing that there is a simpler model of the universe or photosynthesis or of a shark or anything like that, and that even something that does seem superfluous, we can't say that in the larger scheme of things, that it's actually the simplest way to do that, right. So like like a shark seems like, man, maybe do you need that extra fin or something like that, Or does a cow really need eight stomachs? Or do we really need two kidneys?
Right?
But what this point is saying is that there's we don't have the information to look at everything on such a grand scheme of things to say no, there if humans only had one kidney, this other larger system would break down, and this is actually the simplest way to do it, right.
Or there's a cow with one stomach that we can compare it to right.
Right exactly, So this whole thing, this is the point, Chuck, where I reach this very glaring idea that o COM's razor or what Aristotle said that simplicity is perfection, that's all man made, that's human made. Sure, that's a human made concept. To value simplicity is human made. It is possible the universe complicated you can come up with all sorts of examples of the universe being seemingly pretty complicated.
Just the universe itself seems pretty complicated, frankly, right, So that doesn't necessarily mean that the universe tends towards simplicity. It seems like humans value simplicity and the universe uses simplicity a lot, But that doesn't mean that simplicity is perfection or correctness. That's a human construct.
Well, yeah, and like let's say, in terms of engineering, it's probably a decent model to think, hey, the more complex the system is that I'm engineering, the more things that are to break. So we should probably try and make it as simple as possible. That still gets the job done. But that's not to say that it can be rudimentary, like you might need it might need to be a little bit complicated to run at its most.
Efficient, you know, yeah, exactly.
Or art I mean, that's a whole different can of worms. You know, that's entirely subjective. Like is you might find one drummer that says less is more. You just need to provide that basic backbeat and leave room, and then you Stuart Copeland comes in the room and laughs and punches you in the face because you look like sting.
Thumps you in the head.
You know.
So that's that's entirely subjective when it comes to art, like you know, you've been to a museum and seen a twelve inch by twelve inch square painted red, and then you've also seen Jackson Pollock or Free de Collo. So again, it's just subjective as to simplicity. And maybe I don't know, can you apply it to art?
Am I wrong? There?
No, not necessarily. I think that's a good point because it's still it's it's subjectively valuing something, whether it's complexity or whether it's simplicity. It's it doesn't mean it's right. That's the point, right that. I think that's your point. Is one's not right over the other.
Yeah, I think that's my point.
And then there's also plenty of circumstances where Akam's razor just doesn't help very much, like very famously Ptolemy's idea of the universe. The Earth is the center of the universe.
The geocentric universe, I think, is what it's called, where the Earth is the center of the universe, the Sun, the Moon, and all the planets and all the stars revolve around Earth is known to be wrong now, but for a long time that's what everyone thought until the Copernican Revolution, where we realize that not a universe, but our solar system is sun centered. The Sun is at the center, and the Earth is actually moving around it.
The thing is is, if you look, if you look at the explanations between the two, they are pretty close, and one's not necessarily less simple than the other. And if you put them side by side Ockham's razors, that doesn't really help. You have to dig a little deeper and figure it out that actually know this one's right based on these observations. We think this one's right, but it has nothing necessarily to do with complexity. And then on the other side of the equation, just because something's
complex doesn't mean that it's wrong. So the next time somebody starts flailing some Occam's razor stuff at you, you tell them I'm gonna thump you. Do you want to be thumped?
You don'tump and everybody me, yeah.
Well, because they're asking for it.
Is it just a very mild act of violence? Yeah, you don't want to be two. You don't want to punch someone in the face.
No, no, and plus I mean think you shouldn't you shouldn't thump anybody and way I was totally kidding it. Okay, okay, thanks for setting me up for that one. Sure. Oh one other thing, A lot of people say that OCAM's razor squashes free thought, So I think that does kind of tie in with your art thing, you know what I mean, like, feel free to go be complex, there's nothing wrong with it, doesn't like not everything has to be funneled through this Okham's razor thing and made simpler
just to make it better. Yeah, well, Chuck, we made it through this one sort of It's better than Jackhammers.
I'll tell you that I think you did well.
I think you did as well man. That means that it was a good episode. If you want to learn more about Akham's razor, you could read my SOSO article on the site how Stuffworks dot com. Just type it in the search bar. And since I said so, so it's time for a listener mail.
All right, I'm gonna call this North Korea Part two. We heard from a woman in Australia. We were corrected. It just starts with a nest.
There is no.
Awe, right, a woman in Australia named Claire Sutherland who actually had an interaction away with North Korea when she was editor at Australian newspaper called Little m Big X.
Okay, it's MX.
But it's just X.
Oh is it No? I don't know know.
They don't say awe before Australia.
So oh, I got you.
Probably not the Little Lamp.
Well, she's based in Elbourne and they have editions in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane. And she says, during the London Olympics in our daily metal tally graphic, we listed North and South Korea as a naughty Korea and nice Korea. Just
kind of a cheeky thing, I guess, she said. We've been doing this for about a week when we received a call from a Wall Street Journal reporter based in Seoul seeking comment about the fact that North Korea just issued an official condemnation of our paper and its editor.
At first, our assumption was.
We were being punked, but he directed us to the official PR website of North Korea. Sure enough, there was a flowery diatribe and Communist English which misnamed their paper Metro by the Way, and called us sordid bullying and petty thieves, declaring we would be cursed long in Olympic history. I think my favorite extract is this, She says, editors of the paper were so incompetent as to tarnish the reputation of the paper by themselves by producing the article
like that. There is a saying a straw may show which way the wind blows, a single article may exhibit the level of the paper. Wow came down on her, She says. The Wall Street Journal described the official statement as most unusual, and we ended up making some minor international headlines because of it. We ran the statement in full with a story about our sudden entry into world affairs on the front page. The headline was North Korea fires missive. At the time we thought it was equal
parts ridiculous and funny. It happened today at probably try and arrange new identities for me and my staff. Anyway, thanks from me and my dog for the show. Looking forward to seeing you in Melbourne. That is from Claire Sutherland.
Thanks Claire, that was a great story. Well you really want this one over, don't you.
Sure?
If you want to get in touch with me and Chuck with a great story, you can tweet to us, I'm at Josh M. Clark, Chuck's at movie Crush, We're both at s YSK podcast. Chuck's on Facebook dot com slash Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and we're at Facebook dot com slash stuff You should know. You can send us an email to Stuff Podcast at HowStuffWorks dot com and is always joining us at our home on the web, Stuff youshould know dot com For more on this and
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