treating it as the most probable theory (and then making decisions based upon it) is something I have concluded for myself as folly.
Sure, but your tools reasoning about the past are quite limited. Occam's Razor helps us identify where narrative elements are unnecessary for an explanation, and in that it's quite useful. For most of history we must rely on Occam's Razor to even construct any sort of probability model. After all what's easier to believe—acting like the historical record was fabricated with the intent of deceiving us, or acting like the people who wrote the historical records generally had rational reasons to do so? The basis for preferring the latter is inherently an application of Occam's Razor.
Native Americans in the Pacific Northwest actively encouraged the formation of geological structures in order to increase shellfish yield and sustainability. You seem to think that the simplest explanation is that people just copied happy accidents, when the level of sophistication of these systems combined with the documented propensity of humans to actively engineer their way out of problems leads to the simplest explanation being that what we see with both the food forests and mariculture is such active engineering.
The only way to come to a different conclusion is to assume that something is fundamentally different between Old World and New World populations just because one group's processes are relatively well-documented and the other's isn't. However, that conclusion would be colored by your relative inexperience with the shape of New World solutions. We're just discovering these phenomena because we didn't have the vision to see that they existed, biased as we are to the Eurasian perspective. If all you know are wheels, you won't recognize llama tracks, as it were.
It's been my experience with myself and observing people that beliefs can form in both reasonable and unreasonable ways. While people often times have reasons of their own, I've learned not to take it for granted, or even assume that my reconstruction of those reasoning is correct.
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Sure, but your tools reasoning about the past are quite limited. Occam's Razor helps us identify where narrative elements are unnecessary for an explanation, and in that it's quite useful. For most of history we must rely on Occam's Razor to even construct any sort of probability model. After all what's easier to believe—acting like the historical record was fabricated with the intent of deceiving us, or acting like the people who wrote the historical records generally had rational reasons to do so? The basis for preferring the latter is inherently an application of Occam's Razor.
You're misusing Occam's Razor because of a misunderstanding about indigenous people's capacity for engineering.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/24712701
https://worldoceanreview.com/en/wor-8/targeted-interventions...
https://www.si.edu/newsdesk/releases/indigenous-peoples-have...
Native Americans in the Pacific Northwest actively encouraged the formation of geological structures in order to increase shellfish yield and sustainability. You seem to think that the simplest explanation is that people just copied happy accidents, when the level of sophistication of these systems combined with the documented propensity of humans to actively engineer their way out of problems leads to the simplest explanation being that what we see with both the food forests and mariculture is such active engineering.
The only way to come to a different conclusion is to assume that something is fundamentally different between Old World and New World populations just because one group's processes are relatively well-documented and the other's isn't. However, that conclusion would be colored by your relative inexperience with the shape of New World solutions. We're just discovering these phenomena because we didn't have the vision to see that they existed, biased as we are to the Eurasian perspective. If all you know are wheels, you won't recognize llama tracks, as it were.
It's been my experience with myself and observing people that beliefs can form in both reasonable and unreasonable ways. While people often times have reasons of their own, I've learned not to take it for granted, or even assume that my reconstruction of those reasoning is correct.