Sometimes, watching or listening to a baseball game, you are subjected by the broadcasters to a lengthy discussion of the endlesssly subtle reasonings that must have gone into some managerial decision, such as allowing a batter to swing away when everyone thinks he should try to lay down a sacrifice bunt. I always suspect that the actual reason may be very simple--the batter doesn't know how to bunt. After all, if you're in the big leagues, you've been one of the best hitters on every team you've ever played for. You don't know how to bunt for the same reason that Babe Ruth didn't.
In general, simple explanations are to be preferred to ones that have a lot of moving parts. Philosophers have a term for this principle: Occam's Razor, after the 14th-century scholastic theologian, William of Occam, who held that, faced with competing hypotheses, the one requiring the fewest assumptions should be selected. Adopting this principle functions as a bulwark against all kinds of magical thinking and bizarre conspiracy theories that seem to be so much a part of the scene. It's not just that the batter can't bunt. Oswald acted alone, the fossil record should be attributed to evolution and an earth more than 10,000 years old, our planet is warming on account of human activities, President Obama was born in Hawaii, and Donald Trump plausibly qualifies as a racial bigot, whereas his opponent does not.
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