Occam's RAZR

Occam's Razor states "Entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity". According to the Razor, if there are two theories explaining a phenomenon, the simplest is often correct. I should mention at the outset that this law is a heuristic, and there are counter-examples. However, its been used prolifically in almost all fields including Computer Science, Biology, Medicine, Philosophy, Statistics and even Religion.

An attempt to apply Occam's Razor to itself yields the statement, "The simplest explanation is the best". This is a good heuristic that can be widely (and wildly) applied. Leonardo da Vinci extended this to the statement "Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication". He associated simplicity with sophistication and elegance. One can use this simple principle almost everywhere in life.

We use gadgets like computers, cell phones, music players, GPS navigation systems, etc. More often than not, these devices have very complex interfaces that only 13 year old kids can operate easily and with expertise. Almost everyone who was not 13 when the device surfaced in the market has trouble with intricate and often counter-intuitive interfaces.

There was a generation that defied Occam's razor and associated complexity and esotericity with sophistication and usability. Elegance was defined as a 3 mega-pixel camera that cost a thousand dollars, which only the owner's pre-teen nephew could operate. Computer programs would almost always boast hugely complex menus, large scary sounding dialog boxes, millions of features no one ever used, hundreds of buttons on the screen, etc. In fact, if it didn't have these attributes, it often became a marketing nightmare to convince the users that it was useful. Website designs, advertisements, musical scores, government forms, corporate processes, logos, etc were invariably full of intricate detail. Those years should be called the "Era of Complexity".

In the later half of this decade, people have been giving more thought to the fact that simplicity may actually enhance usability. This line of thinking is quickly ushering in the Era of Simplicity. Thinkers, Designers, Artists, Programmers, user interface developers for applications and devices, media people have started pushing the idea that the simplest interface is in fact, the best. This is a restatement of the Razor for the technology era.

Taking simplicity seriously, and the world by storm are Google (the minimalistic search interface created a fanatic fan following), Apple with it's IPod Nano and Motorola with the simple, yet elegant cell phone RAZR, both of which have become fashion statements. The Das Keyboard takes Occam's principle to the limit -- an all-black keyboard with completely blank keys!

The nerd acronym for Occam's Razor is KISS (Keep It Short and Simple). This is a good heuristic for most things. We can apply the KISS philosophy to language, lifestyle, design, law, etc. The simplest way to say a sentence is often the cleanest way. The Constitution was written in the Era of Complexity and this excludes many from understanding the law clearly. Complex language also can create multiple interpretations thus making law a very lucrative career. Disaster often happens when people misinterpret complex instructions which were worded that way for sake of lucid comprehension. Adding complexity for disambiguating semantics often muddles it.

A simple formula gives us the amount of information packed in a given chunk of data, and redundancy reduces it's quality. This is a direct derivation of Occam's Razor. This means that the amount of information doesnt depend on the number of bits the data chunk contains, but rather on the lack of redundancy (also called entropy). Thus, a stream of a million A's has very little information content, as it can be simplified to the form {A, million}. In contrast, a stream of purely random numbers contains a large amount of information as further encoding may actually increase the size of the stream. This is a well known result in Information Theory, and the take-away message is -- "the simpler the encoding, the better the result".

Logos, scores, websites, Ads, posters, interfaces, clothes, furniture and even recepies are getting simpler. Some are almost minimalistic. This in my opinion is a good trend. If it's redundant, remove it. More of us should apply this law to make our lives simpler. In fact, the whole world needs a user interface review, to attempt to remove all unnecessary complexity and boil it all down to the simplest possible useful interface.

I am not saying that we should eliminate complexity. Its all relative. There will always be complexity in the universe. There will also be a threshold beyond which, adding any more intricacies will be useless, and even hamper efficiency. Every bit of complexity added increases the likelihood of error. Given a model, we should strive to find the simplest possible explanation; given a problem, to find the simplest possible correct solution.

The motto of the "Era of Simplicity" should simply be Simplest is Best.