Too late for me to edit my sibling comment; but it just occurred to me that you are using the same methodology as Carrier to come to conclusions about historical facts. You call it Occam's razor. Carrier calls it Bayesian probability. But the idea is the same: what is the most likely (most probable) interpretation of the presented evidence. It is funny that, appealing to the same methodology, you arrive at different conclusions.
He's called a crank because the consensus historian opinion is that he'a a crank.
No, it's not. One is a argument about the semantics of the rhetorics and the other is quantitative dealing with lists of claims about the world.
> The reason that a complex explanation is less probable than a simple one is because a complex explanation contains multiple parts (which is what makes it complex), and the probabilities of each of these parts multiply to produce the probability of the whole, which of course quickly makes this overall probability very small.
There is no straightforward connection between probability and the complexity of a set of claims. Sometimes probable events are very complex to explain; sometimes highly unlikely events are simple.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solomonoff%27s_theory_of_induc...