Firionel comments on The prior of a hypothesis does not depend on its complexity - Less Wrong

26 Post author: cousin_it 26 August 2010 01:20PM

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Comment author: Firionel 27 August 2010 08:49:30AM 7 points [-]

I'm new here, so maybe I'm just being stupid, but I'm massively confused by this (and previous discussion hasn't cleared it up for me):

The complexity of "A and B and C and D" is roughly equal to the complexity of "A or B or C or D"

That to me seems to be an utterly unfounded assertion. Of course the complexity of the two statements is more or less the same, but the the complexity of the state of the world given by A&B&C&D would be the length of the shortest description of a state of the world satisfying A and B and C and D, whereas the complexity of A|B|C|D would be the length of the shortest description of a state of the world satisfying at least one of the conditions. The latter one is potentially much smaller than the former, is it not?

Comment author: cousin_it 27 August 2010 09:20:21AM -1 points [-]

You're right. In the post I refer only to "surface" complexities of statements, making what amounts to an obvious point.