It’s a heuristic that says ‘most often the simplest solution is the best solution’. It’s supposed to be used to shorten the path of finding a viable solution to a question or problem.
Basically, you find the simplest possible solutions, the ones with the fewest variables to account for, and you test them. They usually take the least amount of time to test, and they usually yield a solution faster because of that.
This heuristic is often misused by concluding that very simple answers are immediately correct without actually verifying. Its best application is for selecting possible solutions to test only.






Nobel had his brother exploded by the nitroglycerine
formula he created, so for certain disgustingly wealthy folks, it really do be just ‘a random person dies’ matter.EDIT: sorry, not one of Nobel’s later formulations, it was actually just straight nitroglycerine. Alfred Nobel would later stabilize it with diatomaceous earth and then, much later, with cotton.