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What is interesting to me is how recent Occaam's razor is (800 years) and why it was introduced (to understand the Trinity in western Christianity). It's been
by sgt101 9y ago
What is interesting to me is how recent Occaam's razor is (800 years) and why it was introduced (to understand the Trinity in western Christianity).
It's been a successful heuristic, but for understanding the things that can be understood simply - we shouldn't believe that nature "wants" to be simple though...
- kortex 9y agoOccam's razor in a lot of ways is a proxy for Bayes' theorem. The theorem "punishes" more complex models by shrinking the prior term and increasing the marginal term, while the likelihood is pegged at P = 1.0 at most. You can come up with a model that perfectly explains the outcome ( P(e|H) = 1 ) but you have to offset the insane improbability of pegging all those free parameters at the value they are at ( P(H) ).