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Slightly off-topic, but how robust is Occam’s Razor as a principle for judging the likelihood of a theory being true?
by christudor 7y ago
Slightly off-topic, but how robust is Occam’s Razor as a principle for judging the likelihood of a theory being true?
- scarejunba 7y agoOccam's razor is the search heuristic with bottommost priority. It works well because it's easier to falsify simpler things than more complex things. It's a technique to avoid adding epicycles and not very effective further up from there. If you have other reasons to believe a more complex hypothesis may be likely those should generally override Occam's Razor.
- gbrown 7y agoI started typing a reply, but as usual Wikipedia has a better response than I do: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor#Justifications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor#Justifications