Allan Milne Lees
1 min readAug 13, 2019

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Dear old William of Occam was perhaps the first but by no means the last person to observe that an explanation of any phenomenon should be as simple as possible so that it entirely accounts for the phenomenon being observed without introducing any unnecessary elements. Speculative notions about what a future technological civilization might do and spurious math extrapolations from those entirely speculative notions constitute a perfect example of baroque theory-building without any underlying empirical evidence to suggest that such theories are even required in the first place. Or to put it another way, aren’t we humans endlessly good at disappearing up our own fundaments?

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Allan Milne Lees
Allan Milne Lees

Written by Allan Milne Lees

Anyone who enjoys my articles here on Medium may be interested in my books Why Democracy Failed and The Praying Ape, both available from Amazon.

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