Occam's Razor

Let me start off with a brief explanation of what Occam's Razor is for those of you out there who don't quite know what it is. Because when first beginning to listen to This American Life's audio piece about it, I had heard the term but never really had it explained. Occam's Razor is basically a principle that states that "the simplest answer is usually the correct one." This means in a little more depth that if you have two or more hypotheses that explain a situation, the simplest one, the one with the least details in explanation, is most likely the one that is most correct. With me so far?

Ok, so based on this small explanation, let me tell you a little bit about the audio piece based on Occam's Razor that was aired on This American Life. The entire piece is titled Family Physics and is about an hour long. It includes a prologue and three acts, the first one being Occam's Razor, which is a 30-minute long segment about 7:30 into the audio stream. Pretty cool story, so go check it out: Occam's Razor.

Basically, the narrator Cris Beam tells a story with voice clips from her story subjects, a family that had one theory about their family and when that theory became no longer adequate, they changed their theory. The original theory: that their first born son was a very dark Italian child, despite being obviously different from his parents and siblings. The reworked theory: that he was actually bi-racial and had a different father, a black man his mother had also been sleeping with when she became pregnant.

So how OR works in this story is that the family was in a sense avoiding the other possibility by sticking with their original theory. No one wanted to brooch the subject and have to come to terms with the reality. They were forcing a theory that was failing. Once they did change their theory though, to the simpler and thus correct theory, their lives began to fall into place. Their simplest explanation finally came to light.

The thing about this story is that Beam is both a prominent narrator and a character in the piece, something that as mentioned in my previous post is a highly debated choice in the multimedia storytelling world. Does it work? Yes. It makes things a little choppy in places, but it gives some quick background and explanations that might have had to be longer if Beam had stayed out of the piece.

So, my personal opinion? I like it. I want to be a part of my pieces if I am a part of them during their creation. You can't cut yourself out completely if you really were there, helping the story happen along in the first place.