razor

I'll use pastebin to fit a longer explanation into the box.

My flashlight won't turn on.  I come up with four hypotheses as to why:

The batteries are dead.
The batteries are backwards.
The spirit of my flashlight is displeased.
The bulb is dead.

We start by testing the simplest and most basic hypotheses, because these are the easiest to test.  Our order of complexity becomes:

The batteries are backwards.
The batteries are dead.
The bulb is dead.
The spirit of my flashlight is displeased.

The final one of course requires me to assume that spirits exist, flashlights have them, spirits can be displeased, and unhappy spirits make flashlights stop working.  I also have to figure out how to please the spirit in order to test it.  This is a very complicated hypothesis with a number of preassumptions attached to it, therefore I would only consider it when all other conservative ideas have failed.

This does not mean that it isn't true and that's where a lot of people trip up.  We favor simpler hypotheses over more complex hypotheses with Occam's Razor, but many people take this to mean that the simplest hypothesis is always true.  That is not what it means and that is not correct.