>In a way this is just a restatement of Occam's Razor, but I like it because it clarifies why Occam's Razor is a good idea. It's not because simpler solutions a

>In a way this is just a restatement of Occam's Razor, but I like it because it clarifies why Occam's Razor is a good idea. It's not because simpler solutions are actually more likely to be true; they usually aren't. It's because it's almost always easier to improve a simple solution by adding complexity, than it is to improve a complicated solution by digging out a simple solution buried within it. While the second part of that is an interesting observation, the first part is simply false. It basically comes down to prior probabilities and conjunctions. Every bit of new information implied by a hypothesis is another "and". It is a simple fact that P(X) ≥ P(X and Y), so the more conjunctions your hypothesis implies (the more complex it is) the lower its prior probability.