LESSON 4 · The Mental Models Playbook
The Principle of Parsimony
Occam's Razor states that among competing explanations, the one requiring the fewest assumptions should be preferred.

If your car will not start, the simplest explanation (dead battery) should be investigated before the complex one (simultaneous failure of fuel pump, starter motor, and alternator). Each component failure is an independent probability, and their simultaneous occurrence is vanishingly small.