Posted on October 21st 2017
Occam and Ad Hominem
By Alex Linder
Been thinking about this a lot lately. I believe Occam's Razor is the most important thought a human ever had. Its power is underrated. People, particularly whites, prefer fantasy to reality. So when we're all "love your race," we ought to begin by knowing our race. Not just its good side but its bad side. The bad side of our comparative racial creativity is our taste for delusion, for fantasy, for religion - for things that aint true but whimsically amuse our childish side that is the rich creamy nougat in far too many of us. The milder form of this, the daily form, is preferring elaborate explanations to simple ones. See the reaction to Vegas or any other mass shooting. But Occam was correct: the simplest explanation that covers the given facts is usually correct. It's certainly the place to start. Only go elaborate if you need to - because in the vast majority of cases, we don't. ... Then the thought I had this week was that Ad Hominem is always cited as a logical fallacy, yet it's essentially the Occam's Razor of motive-spotting. Nine times out of ten the reason a man says something traces back to his personal interests or some other private motivation. So the use of AH is logical - because it's the shortest route to the truth, in most cases. It might not be purely logical, but it's "street logical." It's akin to the "Norwegian Way," in the crab boat skipper's delightful (from the tv show): "There's a right way, a wrong way, and the Norwegian Way." Ad Hominem is the Norwegian way: looking for a personal motive is the way to understand someone's argument most of the time. And, I, for one, will continue to celebrate Occam and apply his Razor because he came up with the single most powerful, or at least useful, thought any human will ever have.
[ The above is from a blog posting. ]