 Mystery: January 15, 2014 Issue [#6102] |
  Mystery
This week: Occam's Razor Edited by: Jeff  
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"Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known."
-- Carl Sagan
Mystery Trivia of the Week: The board game Clue (or Cluedo in some countries) was originally created in 1949 by a British law clerk. The original incarnation of the game was called "Murder!" and had several features that never made it into the first public availability of the game. Those changes include the additional characters of Mr. Brown, Mr. Gold, Miss Grey, and Mrs. Silver, as well as an additional room (the "Gun Room") and the following weapons: axe, bomb, syringe, poison, shillelagh, and fireplace poker. Some unused characters and weapons did make appearances in later versions of the game.
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OCCAM'S RAZOR
As I was trying to come up with a topic for this week's Mystery Newsletter, inspiration came in the midst of a small party (board game night!) that my wife and I hosted as a belated way to celebrate our birthdays. And it seems somewhat fitting that the game that sparked the idea for this Mystery Newsletter was none other than Clue. 
First of all, if you need a little background:
Quick Explanation of How to Play ▼
For those of you unfamiliar with the game, the basic idea is that you're trying to solve a murder by successfully guessing the murderer, the weapon of choice, and the room of a mansion in which the murder was committed. Game play starts out with players each holding a few cards with rooms, weapons, or suspects on them (one of each is randomly chosen and set aside at the beginning, and all remaining weapon and room and suspect cards are divided up among the players). Players then move around the game board, entering specific rooms and making accusations. Other players then must show the guesser a card if they have it, thereby allowing the guesser to eliminate that item from the list of possibilities. Eventually, a guesser will eliminate all possibilities except one weapon, one room, and one suspect, leaving them with the answer. First person to come up with that answer wins the game.
Now, during this particular game, my cousin actually stumbled across the solution. He guessed a suspect, a weapon, and a room that he didn't have, and no one else at the table could produce either. So he had the answer. By default, those must be the right cards because he knew he didn't have them, and no one else could produce one either. On his next turn, he should have headed right to the final spot on the board, made his accusation, and won.
However, my wife sensed that he seemed to be close to figuring out the solution, so on her next turn, she guessed all of the cards in her own hand. Now, it's a common strategy to guess one of the cards you already have in your hand to help eliminate other possibilities more efficiently (for example, if you have the card for Colonel Mustard, guessing him in different rooms and with different weapons will help you whittle down the weapons and rooms much faster since you know no one else can show you Colonel Mustard), but it's extremely rare to guess all of your own cards because then you essentially waste a turn by not being able to eliminate any extra items. That wasn't really my wife's goal, though. Her goal was to confuse my cousin because there's no direct benefit to guessing all your own cards... and when they went around the room, no one else could produce any of the cards my wife guessed. My cousin became confused, because there were now two sets of guesses that no one could produce. He became convinced that either (a) someone was lying and withholding a card (which is against the rules), or (b) that the game was defective and maybe we were missing a card or something. It took him eight more turns before he finally just decided to guess that first combo that he knew he didn't have and no one else had. He ended up being right and winning the game, but the point is that my wife's little misdirect ended up costing him eight turns' worth of frustrating, during which the rest of the players got ever-closer to finding the solution for themselves.
What my wife's little subterfuge brought to mind for me is the principle of Occam's Razor (sometimes spelled Ockham's Razor), which states that the simplest solution is usually the correct one. More specifically, the solution that requires you to make the fewest assumptions is usually the correct one. So if you hear a window shatter, find a baseball in the house, and look outside to see the neighborhood kid holding a bat in his hands... you're making one assumption (the kid holding the bat hit the ball through your window), which is a more likely explanation than his excuse which is that he hit the ball, an eagle swooped down and grabbed the ball in its talons, dropped it on the trampoline, and the bounce off the trampoline is what caused the ball to go through the window. That excuse requires three assumptions (the eagle, dropping it on the trampoline, and the trampoline propelling it through the window), which is more than one... and therefore guessing that the kid hit it through the window himself is probably the thing that actually happened.
According to Occam's Razor, my cousin should have immediately run to the final stage of the game and guessed Professor Plum in the Lounge with the Revolver as soon as he figured out that he didn't have any of the cards and no one else did either. But my wife's ruse convinced him that there was a larger issue and he went from making one assumption (that the cards no other player had were the correct ones), to making several assumptions... including that cards were missing from the game, or that someone was cheating by not showing a card they should have.
And as fun as it was to give my cousin a hard time about his frustration with my wife's ruse, I don't think most of us are all that different from him. We want to know things for certain. Even when were 99% sure of something, that 1% nags at us. A margin of error, no matter how small or minuscule, drives us crazy because we don't want to commit to a course of action until we're 100% sure of the outcome. Even when Occam's Razor is staring us in the face, we still question the unknown and wonder if maybe, somewhere along the line, there's a piece of information we don't have, or that things are much more complicated than they seem.
My humble suggestion this week is simply to use that human tendency to your advantage when you write. Use a reader's dread of ambiguity and uncertainty to throw them for a loop and keep them guessing, even if the Occam's Razor applies to your story and the easiest, simplest solution is the one they're actually going to end up realizing at the very end. Make your readers second-guess themselves. Make them wonder if they've missed something or think that things aren't what they seem. Breed an air of mystery by planting just enough questions in their minds so that they keep going until that pesky 1% has been fully resolved. Think about the movies you've seen and the books you've read where you've guessed who the criminal is in the first half of the story... but then you've revised your guess and allowed yourself to believe it's more complicated than it seemed at first... only to realize at the very end that you were right the first time.
That's the power of misdirection; making people - even those who understand the principle of Occam's Razor - question whether they really have a grasp of all the facts, or if there's some tiny thing out there that they missed. That need to know for certain is what will keep them turning pages until the very, very end. 
Until next time,
-- Jeff
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I encourage you to check out the following mystery items:
There was only one way out. But one would have to weave his way through the taproom filled to bursting with drunken mercenaries. Not the ideal scenario for any man stuck in the farthest corner from the exit, much less for a woman.
Mist. Thick impenetrable mist, wherever she turned. She looked around in a futile attempt to determine her location. Panic began to spread throughout her body, like thousands of ice cold pin pricks. The sensation moved up her chest, towards her throat in anticipation of a scream or sob - she didn't know which. Before a single sound was omitted, warmth penetrated through the density of the misty world before her.
We danced downstairs like we hadn't a care in the world. I heard chattering, and the sound of silver spoons stirring in Elaine's gaudy, Royal Albert Old Country Roses-designed teacups, the name she dropped every Tuesday morning for the last two years. Marla and I were recently victims of newer trade-ins, divorced by the used-by-date. The rest of the ladies were widows. Economically, we were orphaned to the other side of the tracks despite the fact our homes were just as large, but unfortunately, an asset which needed funds and out-servicing to keep up.
No one looked up or asked any questions. They will soon.
Benny had been running the produce stand at the corner of Fifth and Grant for the past fifteen years. He had several customers that had been coming in regularly since the beginning and many of them still acted as if he were deaf as well as blind. They would say things around him that they wouldn’t say around a waiter or another sighted person. They also confided things that they wouldn’t ordinarily share with stranger, as if there was a special confidentiality conferred by his blindness.
It was a rather nice desk to say the least. It was constructed of hardwood, and all glued and pegged from what I can tell, for there was nary a screw on the thing, except for the ones that held the hinges on the little cubby hole door that sat right in the center of it. But to say that it had a soul, and was possessed by the crow that once lived in the tree that it was constructed from—absurd! Absurd at least from my point of view, but Randavar thought otherwise.
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Feedback from my last newsletter about consequences:
Quick-Quill  writes, "My favorite of all consequence books is written by Robert Mull called Fablehaven. Although it is a YA it is a wonderfully written book on the order of Spiderwick. However what puts this so high on my list of booka for all parents to read WITH their children, is the way he brings out that all our actions have consequence. Even when they aren't mean to be mean or we didn't disobey on purpose, if we aren't careful someone can get hurt that we didn't mean to. He writes a wonderful series but I can't get this first book out of my head."
I haven't checked that one out yet, but sounds like a good one!
DB Cooper  writes, "On the subject of consequences will they execute the Ft.Hood shooter who is paralyzed from the neck down? Should they?"
Honestly, I have no idea.
From a previous newsletter about the damsels and The Bechdel Test:
Joto-Kai  writes, "The Bechdel test is interesting but somewhat silly. It seems to me that telling a story about men is hardly the same as downgrading women. Don't many stories downgrade their subject?
Also, how might one pass Bechdel if the POV is male?
Still, it's an interesting metric, if somewhat shallow and frivolous."
I agree that it's nothing more than a curious metric, but I do think it's an interesting one worth considering. On the one hand, "failing" the Bechdel test, as you mentioned, is not the same as necessarily downgrading women. But on the other hand, if you're writing a novel or feature screenplay-length piece of fiction and can't manage to have two female characters converse with each other about something other than marriage or babies in that whole story... that does seem like a rather low bar that is rather easily reached by an attentive writer.
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