> what one person finds a simpler or more elegant theory, another person might not; in that sense it is quite arbitrary There are ways of making it formal and

> what one person finds a simpler or more elegant theory, another person might not; in that sense it is quite arbitrary There are ways of making it formal and precise. See section 3 in this chapter from Judea Pearl's book: http://bayes.cs.ucla.edu/BOOK-99/ch2.pdf http://bayes.cs.ucla.edu/BOOK-99/ch2.pdf or for a more lightweight discussion that happens to be in my tab stack atm, see https://probmods.org/occam's-razor.html https://probmods.org/occam's-razor.html I understand people think they're being helpful with the knee jerk "that's not science" response to someone asserting Occam, since the principle is often abused/overused, but the academic perspective on this has been much richer for decades now. It's not fair to just sweep that away with a ba-humbug.