prase comments on The Strong Occam's Razor - Less Wrong

13 Post author: cousin_it 11 November 2010 05:28PM

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Comment author: prase 12 November 2010 07:07:30PM 2 points [-]

My favourite justification of the Occam razor is that even if two theories are equivalent in their explicit predictions, the simpler one is usually more likely to inspire correct generalisations. The reason may be that the more complicated the theory is, the more arbitrary constraints it puts on our thinking, and those constraints can prevent us from seeing the correct more general theory. For example, some versions of aether theory can be made eqivalent to special relativity, but the assumptions of absolute space and time make it nearly impossible to discover something equivalent to general relativity, starting from aether.