cousin_it 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

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (59)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: cousin_it 28 August 2010 06:00:04AM 1 point [-]

Huh? All hypotheses of a given complexity don't have to sum to 1, because they aren't mutually exclusive.

Comment author: orthonormal 30 August 2010 12:42:56AM 0 points [-]

The math of it isn't as neat as I'd like, but what I mean is that there are only finitely many hypotheses of each complexity, exponentially many as the complexity goes up, and that most of them differ from each other at some point, so ordinary summability criteria "almost" apply. I don't think that the number of epiphenomenal hypotheses could be enough to keep the average up.

Comment author: cousin_it 30 August 2010 05:54:28AM *  2 points [-]

A hypothesis has approximately the same complexity as its negation, so we have many pairs that sum to 1 each.