Three Razors

To counteract the attraction toward complex stories featuring evil villains, it is useful to keep three “razors” in our cognitive hygiene bag. The term razor is used to describe certain heuristics, or cognitive shortcuts, that can help to quickly “shave” away unnecessary information and complexity and get us more quickly to the truth. We discussed two of them above: the slightly modified Hanlon’s razor, “Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by human fallibility,” and Occam’s razor,