ArisKatsaris comments on A note on the description complexity of physical theories - Less Wrong

19 Post author: cousin_it 09 November 2010 04:25PM

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Comment author: Perplexed 11 November 2010 02:17:54AM *  1 point [-]

Not sure what your objection is here.

I'm not sure I have one. It is just a little puzzling how we might reconcile two things:

  • EY's very attractive intuition that of two theories making the same predictions, one is true and the other ... what? False? Wrong? Well, ... "not quite so true".
  • The tradition in Bayesianism and standard rationality (and logical positivism, for that matter) that the truth of a statement is to be found through its observable consequences.

ETA: Bayes's rule only deals with the fraction of reality-space spanned by a sentence, never with the number of characters needed to express the sentence.

Comment author: ArisKatsaris 11 November 2010 03:05:03AM 0 points [-]

"Bayes's rule only deals with the fraction of reality-space spanned by a sentence"

Well, that's the thing: reality-space doesn't concern just our observations of the universe. If two different theories make the same predictions about our observations but disagree about which mechanism produces those events we observe, those are two different slices of reality-space.

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