To improve your judgement and decision making use Occam’s Razor:

Among competing hypotheses, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected.

In my own words Occam’s Razor is: don’t overthink it, the obvious solution is almost always the correct solution. March Madness provides a great example of overthinking and proving the effectiveness of Occam’s Razor. Let me explain.

My family created a basketball pool for March Madness, the NCAA Division I basketball championship tournament played over the course of three weeks. Each participant in the pool completes on online bracket by predicting the winner of each game. The predicted winners advance to the next rounds where a winner is again predicted and advanced to the next round. This process repeats itself until you have predicted the winner. Considering there are 64 teams in the tournament, six rounds of play,
and the bracket/predictions need to be finalized before a single game of the tournament is played, this can be a very challenging tasks for the casual college basketball fan. Yet millions of people complete a bracket each year.

The task of predicting winners is made easier for the casual fan because a selection committee determines the teams in the tournament using objective metrics such as team record, strength of schedule, offensive and defensive efficiency, etc. They also use subjective information such as injuries that may effect a team’s competitiveness, how well a team is playing at the end of the season, wins and losses over common opponents, etc. The committee of experts uses all of this information to seed (rank) teams using the standard bracket rules where #1 plays #64, #2 plays #63 and so on.

Now, despite the exhaustive process used by the selection committee to seed the teams, many people believe they have additional information and insights that lead them to pick the #45 team to beat the #11 team. And while this does happen now and then, the overwhelming result of this match up is that the #11 team will beat the #45 team. As you might guess, the closer the team seedings the more likely the probability for an upset.

My family basketball pool serves as an interesting test bed for Occam’s Razor. We have family members who didn’t watch a game all season.
These family members generally use the least amount of information they have available to predict the winners, the numeric seeding. Interesting, or maybe not so interesting is you ask Occam, is that many of these family members outperformed other family member’s who watched hours of basketball and sports shows. Even more support for Occam’s Razor, is that many of these same family members, outperformed many of the “celebrity” brackets, those bracket’s completed by people who’s job it is to watch basketball, analyze basketball, and be an expert on basketball. While I don’t know the methods behind the “celebrities” bracket selections, I would venture to guess they believed they possessed more information and insights to pick a team where the obvious information, the team seeding, didn’t support their prediction.

March Madness and family tournament pools are all for fun and have low stacks. Occam’s Razor might help you submit a competitive or winning bracket for some bragging rights. But how can it be applied in more meaningful areas of life?

life if full a decisions requiring good judgement. We all know people who have poor judgement and their lives reflect it. Could Occam’s Razor help these people you know? Could it help you? Do you struggle with decisions where there seems to be an overwhelming number of choices, or decision points? Is it possible that the obvious choice is the correct choice? Occam’s Razor would suggest it is. If we take an honest look at our lives we will find many areas where Occam’s Razor would help us. Think of all the time and energy we could save if we trusted Occam’s Razor.