I can't figure out is Thermal is making an argument against Occam's razor being a useful way to deal with uncertainty, or whether he doesn't agree that the most obvious unestablished factor here that explains the whole incident is extreme drunkenness on behalf of the deceased.
Both strike me as silly, but in very different ways.
The misuse of Occam's Razor here is really bugging me, and I considered starting another thread to discuss it, but I'll just wrap it up below.
Occam's Razor, as the adults here know, does not say that the simplest solution is the best/most likely one. That would be stupid. What it says (going back to my Intro to Phil class) is that the one that requires the least amount of assumptions is probably better. There's a major difference there that gets by a lot of people.
For our purposes, the hoofbeats/horses/zebras analogy is valid. Unless you are in the African savannah/a cicrus/the zoo, the chances of coming across a zebra are basically non-existent, making it unresaonable to assume. Let's call that the Zebra Standard.
So in the Tragic Tale of the Dead Frat Boy, we have three main scenarios:
1.as reported, Donofrio simply goes to the wrong door and attempts to break in.
2. Donofrio attempts to illegally break in to a residence down the road from him (removing assumed credibility of police explanation, lacking demonstrated evidence). His reasons could be anything, love triangle, drug deal, whatever, doesn't matter in the slightest. Don't know, don't care, if it was intentional.
3. Donofrio was drunk. That conveniently handwaves away any reasonable person standards, making him essentially the proverbial raging lunatic. But here comes the other assumptions that follow from that:
a). Donofrio, a college basketball player with NBA aspirations, was an underage drug abuser apparently planning to go to practice the next day hung over, because that's what athletes do on school nights . No witnesses of this binge drinking are reported, so we either assume he was alone or assume a conspiracy of silence among partygoers who wouldn't tweet or Insta about it, as kids are well known to do.
b). Donofrio drank himself to the point of extreme disorientation, yet still upright and coordinated enough to work out violently breaking down the door. That's a tight window.
c). Donofrio, unlike most people, becomes extremely physically violent when drunk. Most people, drunk to the point of not knowing where they are, stumble around and fall, usually passing out. D remained fairly coordinated and aggressive, and able to focus on door destruction to gain entry, while, lest we forget, not actually knowing where he is or realizing it was wrong to destroy other people's property, even if he thought it was his rental.
d). Police and media did not report any of this, which basically requires another conspiracy to withhold relevant facts and make Donofrio look like a sober violent nitwit, as if that's an improvement over being drunk.
All pass the Zebra Standard, as there are no outlandishly unlikely scenarios presented. Everything, from drunken violent frat boy to drug deal gone bad are in the realm of common experience.
That's the major assumptions, we could break down into more. Note that the backgound motivations are not important in any of them (why he got drunk is no more relevant than why he would attempt illegal entry). Scenario 1 requires no assumptions. Scenario 2 requires one, that police reporting is less than defintive and defers to the killer's explanation. Scenario 3 requires multiple assumptions, although some of you didn't realize that. How's y'all's Razor doing?
