I steadily become more of a fan of Kant. He has an excellent principle ‘ought implies can’ (Does this simplify to ‘should implies could’?). Going by the principle of ‘Keep It Simple’ with words as well as concepts, I thoroughly like it.

The full sentence from his book ‘Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason’:

For if the moral law commands that we ought to be better human beings now, it inescapably follows that we must be capable of being better human beings.

Now compare that sentence written in 1793 (you know when, everyone spoke everything in pseudo-latin Shakespearean language) to the much more recent Bertrand Russel talking about keeping it simple (aka Occam’s razor) in the 1920s:

Whenever possible, substitute constructions out of known entities for inferences to unknown entities.

– Logical Constructions

There’s gold amongst them words, but if that get’s lost in translation then it’s no better than lead (“Knowledge is silver, Outlook is gold, IQ is a lead weight”). I read and re-read that sentence and I still don’t get it. I know it’s saying something similar to Occam’s razor, I know the meaning of each of the words in that sentence, but as a combination of words I don’t understand. If I don’t understand what it says I can’t explain it to someone else (the Feynman test), so as much as I admire Russel its hard to spread his ideas.

Because I fairly well understand Kant’s sentence, I can repeat it almost immediately after having read it. I played Chinese whispers with myself, I wrote down on another page what I could remember of Kant’s quote and Russels’ quote:

• Kant (from memory): “If the moral law compels us that we ought to be better human beings that it follows inescapably that we must be capable of becoming better human beings”
• Russel (from memory): “Entities… something something entities.”

As with the concept of cake and repeating any experiment, I suggest you try the same for yourself. How much of Kant’s quote can you remember and how much of Russels’?

Simple and understandable language makes things sticky in our brains. It helps make ideas more viral, for all the silliness surrounding viral posts on social media, making a message easy to transfer between people is powerful. Pass on the message 😉