crossbowman: "As to your example, I guess it's a question of who's holding the razor. Your CERN supervisor has his facts, DW has his, so they're drawing conclusions from differing sets of facts. The problem isn't one of applying of Occam's razor to a set of facts. The problem is one of not agreeing on the starting facts. Your Cern supervisor is not accepting DW's data and so arrives at a different conclusion."

Yes, I agree. In the CERN illustration I made up, I intended, in the description of the CERN designer-supervisor, to depict a Peter Sellers' type of character (remember the movie?) who wield's Occam's Razor to shave, or cut the metaphorical vocal chords of, anyone whose educational discipline is not the one that propelled him to his contract/mandate at CERN.

Whether we laud the KISS behaviour as a useful terminator of unwanted disagreement, or condemn it as a witlessly gross oppression of socially disdvantaged talent whose ideas are the very intellectual vitality by which we might hope to transcend our most intractable problems as a specie, we are wielding an Occam's Razor of our own. At least that is my current perspective.

In thinking about this, would you mind reviewing a second excerpt from my book that I have just posted on my website with an express purpose of illuminating this issue a little further?

The URL is: http://www.authentixcoaches.com/VTTUpcoming2.html