Nov 08 May 09 Title 4

[Daphne]

Hi all!

I'm doing question 4 for my TOK essay - "Seek simplicity and distrust it. Is this always good advice for a knower?"
I have some ideas about what to write, but if anyone has any ideas about examples I could write about I would really appreciate it!!

Thanks in advance! (:

[monica]

First of all, you would have to find a "Yes,but..." or "No,but..." answer.

Example...hmm. You could talk about paradigms. One of my favourite examples is from the time when people still thought that the sun was rotating around the Earth. And they were trying to explain the movement of the stars on the sky according to this assumption. And the calculations formulas became more and more difficult until the point when someone discovered that was not the case. So sometimes complicated answers are not necessarily the correct ones. This would be an argument against.


You should also think of a personal example. Maybe once you chose the easy way out and it proved out to be the wrong decision. We all tend to do that

Hope it works!

[Mandiloquence]

[quote name='monica' post='27145' date='Oct 22 2008, 01:20 PM']First of all, you would have to find a "Yes,but..." or "No,but..." answer.

Example...hmm. You could talk about paradigms. One of my favourite examples is from the time when people still thought that the sun was rotating around the Earth. And they were trying to explain the movement of the stars on the sky according to this assumption. And the calculations formulas became more and more difficult until the point when someone discovered that was not the case. So sometimes complicated answers are not necessarily the correct ones. This would be an argument against.


You should also think of a personal example. Maybe once you chose the easy way out and it proved out to be the wrong decision. We all tend to do that

Hope it works![/quote]

I agree about the personal example, and you also may want to discuss Occam's Razor.
However, my ToK teacher [i]begged[/i] us not to use the example of when people believed the Earth was flat and the sun revolved around it, or any of those overused examples. Once you do some research it'll be easy to find a more original example!

[ctnurul]

help me!!!!!

i want to do my tok essay... and i am interested in a question which is "seek simplicity, and distrust it............................" BUT i can't really figure out what's the meaning behind the quotation. my teacher said is is so philosophical. he discourage us to Q4. but i want to do it..please somebody, give me brief description about this quotation.........please.....................

[Eyas]

If you dont know what the quotation means, why want to do it so much?

[SharkSpider]

Well... in a glaringly literal sense, the quote says that which is simple has a higher chance of being false than that which is complex. The idea is that the rational mind draws conclusions where no conclusions exist, simply based on empirical data. Newton created his laws of mechanics like this, and they were very simple and elegant, and also wrong. Of course, the counterexample is when something simple is true, or when simplicity ties things together well. Generally, you can take that quote to be in a way an attack against a certain style of debating, generally held by fundamentalists, who attempt to use common sense to justify their positions. A fundamentalist atheist may argue that believing in god and all these absolute morals is too complicated, and that it is simpler to be a materialist, because things make more sense that way. The innate fallacy in this argument lies in the assumption that simplicity is something to strive for. The quote points out the fallacy and makes the esact counterclaim.

[Frei]

I wrote about psychodynamic explanations to stuff, and the learning and biological perspectives of psychology... And also, the lincoln index, that is a simplified way of counting mobile organisms. Don't know if that's really useful for anyone... but still