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It's puzzling to see the author call himself multiple times a scientist while lending so much importance to Occam's razor (which is spelled differently in the a
by hota_mazi 10y ago
It's puzzling to see the author call himself multiple times a scientist while lending so much importance to Occam's razor (which is spelled differently in the article, not sure if it's an alternative spelling in his language or a mistake).
Occam's razor is not a law. It's not a fact. It's a simple suggestion if you're looking for a starting hypothesis.
Not sure which way to start to investigate a phenomenon? Pick the simplest one and verify that one. It doesn't mean it's right, it doesn't mean it's wrong, just that it's a reasonable first guess.
But not a proof. Not a fact. Just a guess that's statically more likely to be right.
- defined 10y agoOccam is the Latinized version of Ockham, as in "William of Ockham" [1]. [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_of_Ockham https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_of_Ockham
- TheOtherHobbes 10y agoWhich must be the correct spelling, because it's shorter.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- stan_rogers 10y agoOckham is arguably the proper spelling when the name isn't being rendered in Latin; Ockham is where William was from.
- dragonwriter 10y ago> It's a simple suggestion if you're looking for a starting hypothesis. While it can be used to select priority for exploring hypotheses, it's at least as valuable as a method of choosing from among models with equal explanatory power once they've been tested and established to have equal explanatory power.
- sideshowb 10y agoOck/cham's razor is a heuristic, not a law. It also runs into weirdness combined with MWI. Are infinite universes the simplest explanation, or have you just literally broken Occam's razor in the most egregious way possible?
- andrepd 10y agoIt's not only a heuristic, it's also a principle. It states that "when choosing between two theories which make the exact same predictions, choose the one with the fewer assumptions". Which is to say, correctness comes first, of course, but when deciding between two equally correct theories, choose the one with the fewer assumptions.
- naasking 10y agoNot quite accurate. "Fewest assumptions" assumes that axioms are equally comparable, but this isn't necessarily true. Obviously one should eliminate redundant assumptions, ie. ones that have no effect on observable predictions between two theories, but this provides little guidance for selecting between two theories with drastically different axioms that differ in only a small set of predictions for which we have no data. Ockham's razor, when formalized as in Solomonoff Induction, suggests preferring theories with the lowest Kolmogorov complexity.
- naasking 10y agoOckham's razor is not a heuristic, it's the only principled universal prior for Bayesian reasoning. This was formalized in Solomonoff Induction.