3 ms·
In spirit, yes. However, it gets more interesting if we try to make Occam's Razor more precise with something like Solomonoff induction, then it get's trickier
by xelxebar 8y ago
In spirit, yes. However, it gets more interesting if we try to make Occam's Razor more precise with something like Solomonoff induction, then it get's trickier to decide in practice what "simpler" actually means.
Even if we're able to reduce our competing models to Turing machine implementations, we're only able to calculate their complexity relative to some defined collection of models, which in turn depends on what kind of low-level logical formalism we're using.
In practice, of course, we can't parse out all these formal details for every decision, but I think it's helpful to at least be aware of the inherent problems with naive Occam's Razor.