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Comment by dangerlibrary | Hacker News Reader

Mathematically, sure, that's fine. Empirically/theoretically, you've dug yourself into a hole that is difficult to get out of. You're going against Occam's razor so now you've got a lot of 'splainin' to do.

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It's not clear to me how (and if) Occam's Razor should necessarily be applied in this context. We are not choosing between a very simple, and a vastly complex alternative. Rather we are choosing between an unintuitive and probably complex option (contraceptives are causing less copulation - this does not sound at all like a simple suggestion to me), and admitting that our models and data may not be complete. Either way we need more research to be able to more clearly identify the root causes.

And Occam's razor is really more of a 'which one should we test first' kind of criterion, rather than 'this one is automatically true as it's the simplest.'

Teens are known to be rebellious and to like toeing the line

By making things more accessible and banal, you remove the urge to do it just to spite authority.

That simple argument justifies that teens who can sample alcohol at home are less likely to binge drink, and that kids who have ample access to sex ed and contraception are less likely to go and have sex both logistically and emotionally unprepared

>teens who can sample alcohol at home are less likely to binge drink

That's patently false. Cf. http://www.jsad.com/doi/abs/10.15288/jsad.2015.76.212

So far I find the argument far from convincing.

> You're going against Occam's razor so now you've got a lot of 'splainin' to do.

Where did this idea come from?

Occam's razor is a heuristic, not a law.

When found in the wild, it is more a fallacy than anything else.

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