Let's see if we can restate Occam's Razor in a way less susceptible to misuse. If anybody wants to improve on this, do so with my blessing: Occam's Razor: Sinc

Let's see if we can restate Occam's Razor in a way less susceptible to misuse. If anybody wants to improve on this, do so with my blessing: Occam's Razor: Since P(A and B) is always less than or equal to min(P(A), P(B)), hypotheses with smaller Kolmogorov complexity should be accorded a higher prior probability. From there, update on evidence. If a hypothesis (no matter how simple) is contradicted by the evidence, then obviously your estimate of its probability should go way down. The use of Kolmogorov complexity (or something roughly equivalent like Minimum Description Length) is important here. As explanations of combustion, "A wizard did it" sounds simpler than an explanation of the chemical reaction that actually happened, but a full model of each of these explanations (including the wizard and chemistry) would reveal their true relative complexity: the wizard is much more complex than a few simple rules about chemical reactions.