Yes. Even more generally… might be an over-application of Occam’s razor: insisting everything be maximally simple? It’s maximally simple when A and B correlate to infer that one of them causes the other (instead of postulating a C common cause); it’s maximally simple to explain inexplicable events as due to a supernatural agent (instead of postulating a universe of complex underlying processes whose full explication fills up libraries without end and are still poorly understood).
That sounds more like a poor understanding of Occam’s razor. Complex ontologically basic processes is not simpler than a handful of strict mathematical rules.
Of course it’s (normatively) wrong. But if that particular error is what’s going on in peoples’ heads, it’ll manifest as a different pattern of errors (and hence useful interventions) than an availability bias: availability bias will be cured by forcing generation of scenarios, but a preference for oversimplification will cause the error even if you lay out the various scenarios on a silver platter, because the subject will still prefer the maximally simple version where A->B rather than A<-C->B.
Yes. Even more generally… might be an over-application of Occam’s razor: insisting everything be maximally simple?
That is another aspect, I think, but I I’d probably consider the underlying drive to be not the desire for simplicity but the desire for the world to make sense. To support this let me point out another universal human tendency—the yearning for stories, narratives that impose some structure on the surrounding reality (and these maps do not seek to match the territory as well as they can) and so provide the illusion of understanding and control.
In other words, humans are driven to always have some understandable map of the world around them, any map, even if not very good and even if it’s pretty bad. The lack of some map, the lack of understanding (even if false) of what’s happening is well-known to lead to severe stress and general unhappiness.
Hmm, a very interesting idea.
Related to the human tendency to find patterns in everything, maybe?
Yes. Even more generally… might be an over-application of Occam’s razor: insisting everything be maximally simple? It’s maximally simple when A and B correlate to infer that one of them causes the other (instead of postulating a C common cause); it’s maximally simple to explain inexplicable events as due to a supernatural agent (instead of postulating a universe of complex underlying processes whose full explication fills up libraries without end and are still poorly understood).
That sounds more like a poor understanding of Occam’s razor. Complex ontologically basic processes is not simpler than a handful of strict mathematical rules.
Of course it’s (normatively) wrong. But if that particular error is what’s going on in peoples’ heads, it’ll manifest as a different pattern of errors (and hence useful interventions) than an availability bias: availability bias will be cured by forcing generation of scenarios, but a preference for oversimplification will cause the error even if you lay out the various scenarios on a silver platter, because the subject will still prefer the maximally simple version where A->B rather than A<-C->B.
That is another aspect, I think, but I I’d probably consider the underlying drive to be not the desire for simplicity but the desire for the world to make sense. To support this let me point out another universal human tendency—the yearning for stories, narratives that impose some structure on the surrounding reality (and these maps do not seek to match the territory as well as they can) and so provide the illusion of understanding and control.
In other words, humans are driven to always have some understandable map of the world around them, any map, even if not very good and even if it’s pretty bad. The lack of some map, the lack of understanding (even if false) of what’s happening is well-known to lead to severe stress and general unhappiness.