Ockham’s Razor and The Blogger Who Must Not Be Named

Ockham’s Razor (sometimes spelled Occam’s Razor) is an important idea in the sciences and in other areas where deductive reasoning is important. Ockham said that if there are two plausible theories that could explain the evidence, the simpler theory is more likely to be true. In the sciences, including economics, this theory is called Maximum Likelihood. But this idea extends to other areas.

For example, suppose there is a small fire in a hotel and an employee puts it out. Then a year later another small fire starts in the same building and the same employee puts out the fire. At first glance, you think, “What an odd coincidence.” But a second theory emerges, “Maybe the employee started the fire.” You check for signs of arson and sure enough, you find out the fire had been set. Sure, Ockham’s Razor by itself proves nothing, but he’s been right too often to be ignored. And a corollary to Ockham's razor is that if you get caught starting a fire, you'll get blamed for every fire.

Now consider this: a blogger toils in anonymity for more than a year and gets almost no readers. Then he or she happens to be on the periphery of a major blog scandal and gets tons of visitors. That in itself is not so surprising. After all, it would be an odd life in which nothing interesting ever happened. But then two weeks later the same blogger happens to be there to witness another once-in-a-lifetime event. What a coincidence…or was it? A careful reading of the second incident raises questions. Maybe the blogger made the whole thing up.

Shivam Vij, who writes a very nice blog called Mall Road, alludes to this blogger here. This blogger could be called “The Blogger Who Must Not Be Named” because no one wants to point the accusatory finger just yet. But it will happen shortly.

In the IIPM brouhaha, the motive behind the bogus blogs with bland IIPM content and the words IIPM repeatedly in the title was clear: make sure that IIPM-friendly material would always remain high in a google search and not anti-IIPM blog posts (they also raise the pagerank of someone else). But some comments on blogs lead back to these IIPM blogs – and in Blogger this could only happen if the owner of the blog made the comment. Some of these comments were outrageous. Some of the bogus blogs had outrageous “please sue me” titles like drnoamchomskyonline. Why would the IIPM risk their reputation on immature comments and blog titles? I wondered about this point in this post. I thought at that time that one possibility was that a malicious blogger was creating some of these blogs leaving these comments purposefully to start a blog forest fire. But this theory was not the simplest theory simply because it assumed the existence of a malicious blogger who would post lies for the purpose of creating controversy. Sure, it could happen, but in the absence of any direct evidence, why assume this is likely?

But now The Blogger Who Must Not Be Named has walked onto center stage. What other fires has this blogger set? We have to wonder.

Update
The Blogger Who Must Not Be Named is not Gaurav Sabnis and not Rashmi Bansal.