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timtyler comments on David Deutsch: A new way to explain explanation - Less Wrong
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Okay, I saw in the comments (both here and on the TED site) that Deutsch's point was that good explanations are "hard to vary", but I didn't understand what that means.
So I finally saw the talk (after skipping most of it to get to the explanation of explanation), and it turns out Deutsch just means "lacking unnecessary details" when he says "hard to vary". Which is just the standard point about the conjunction fallacy and how each detail makes your explanation less plausible.
Nothing new here, sorry :-/
This video is not really about the conjunction fallacy - it's more about Occam's razor - but frankly, it presents a version of the razor that's rather muddled.
IMO, traditional presentations of the razor are of much better quality. This video seems like a very bad introduction to the topic to me. It misses the idea of compressing theories as far as the data will allow, and instead promotes a rather dumbed down "hard to vary" -> good, "easy to vary" -> bad philosophy.