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cata comments on A note on the description complexity of physical theories - Less Wrong
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Never mind usefulness, it seems to me that "Evolution by natural selection occurs" and "God made the world and everything in it, but did so in such a way as to make it look exactly as if evolution by natural selection occured" are not the same hypothesis, that one of them is true and one of them is false, that it is simplicity that leads us to say which is which, and that we do, indeed, prefer the simpler of two theories that make the same predictions, rather than calling them the same theory.
I think there's a distinction that should be made explicit between "a theory" and "our human mental model of a theory." The theory is the same, but we rightfully try to interpret it in the simplest possible way, to make it clearer to think about.
Usually, two different mental models necessarily imply two different theories, so it's easy to conflate the two, but sometimes (in mathematics especially) that's just not true.