When Simplicity Misleads

Occam's Razor has limits. Conspiracy theories often appear simpler than the truth because they attribute complex events to a single cause ("it was all planned") while the reality involves multiple independent factors. Simplicity of narrative is not the same as simplicity of assumptions.

A conspiracy theory assumes coordinated secrecy among hundreds or thousands of people. That is not one assumption — it is a cascade of them. Occam's Razor actually rejects such stories because each added actor, motive, and hidden mechanism multiplies the probability of the theory being wrong.