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From: Jasper
Date: Sunday, February 25, 2007
Time: 07:02:48 PM
Paddy, …Thanks for keeping us up to date on your progress. Terrific stuff. Keep it coming. ……..I, too, was most impressed with Schulman’s chapter on Ron Shipp’s alibi for the same reasons you were. My main interest in reading Frame of the Century was to see whether Schulman uncovered information I didn’t have that either confirmed or refuted the place I had for Shipp in the Iago hypothesis. He confirmed it. …….The big deal here is that we did not collaborate on anything. I found what I found. He found what he found. My findings don’t reinforce his but his reinforce mine. I tried out Shipp as a single killer and abandoned him. Schulman stuck with him. I didn’t now know whether or not Shipp had an alibi for the night of the murders. Schulman’s investigation shows that it is highly unlikely that he did. Furthermore, that partial slip of the tongue he caught on Larry King puts him where Iago has him at O.J.’s house. ……….. One of the most often cited and least understood precepts of scientific inquiry is Occam’s razor http://smartfellowspress.com/Iago/appendix.htm (search Occam). If I had known how Schulman and others would misapply it I would have gone into more detail. ………….The common error, as you saw with Schulman, is the assumption that a simple explanation is preferable to a complex one. That’s not exactly correct. Occam’s (or Ockham’s) razor applies only to competing explanations for the same evidence. The only explanations that fit all of the evidence might be extremely complex. A simple one that fits some of the evidence or even most of it does not apply. The thing that tells you which explanation (no matter how simple or complex) is most likely the correct one is how well it stands up when new evidence becomes available. The more complicated the explanations have to get to account for the new evidence the less likely it is to be correct. ……………If your theory is correct, even if some of your base data is incomplete or completely wrong, the correct data will either have no effect on it or reinforce it and make it simpler. If it’s wrong your explanations for the new data will destroy it or require you to make increasingly complicated adjustments to the point of absurdity to preserve it. That’s why trying to prove a theory, especially a simple one, is a bad idea. You can “prove” anything if you make the explanations complicated enough. …………..I thought the Iago hypotheses was silly because it involved too many essential people with to many essential characteristics in too many tightly drawn times and places. However, my problem with every lone killer theory I tried out was that it became increasingly complicated to explain all of the evidence to the point of absurdity. At some juncture every one of them fell apart with new evidence or closer scrutiny of old evidence. If O.J. was framed, Kato’s thumps and the glove found because of them had to be purposefully connected. This was not possible with one person because of the timeline, which would have required him to be in two places at the same time. It works with Shipp because he only had to be in one place during that time. Schulman makes a strong case that he was there during that time. –Jasper