An international team of researchers concluded in the January 2025 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences publication that Ockham’s Razor may need a whetstone. The authors state, “The preference for simple explanations, known as the parsimony principle, has long guided the development of scientific theories, hypotheses, and models,” but accuracy is likely sacrificed when modeling complex systems.
While acknowledging that simple models can be useful and provide accurate outcomes, in recent years, success has been demonstrated using highly complex models for scientific research, such as understanding protein folding and modeling climate over time. Their research also suggests that simple models inherently tend to have built-in biases, leading to predictions that support the initial hypothesis or narrative.
They suggest that the predictive quality of a model may improve by “Progressing from more complex to simpler models. Using more complex models, particularly in the initial stages of scientific exploration when prior knowledge is limited, can be instrumental in uncovering underlying structures in the data… Once we have a successful complex model capturing the structure of the data, this model can be effectively compressed into a more parsimonious account for future use.”
Source: Is Ockham’s razor losing its edge? New perspectives on the principle of model parsimony by Dubova etal, PNAS, 2025. Graphic: iStock Photo, licensed.
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