= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
rocurley comments on Falsification - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (39)
Occam's razor is in your favor here, although there are more compelling arguments than the one your friend is making (see paper-machine's comment).
Yeah, he's trying to make the argument that Occam's Razor doesn't work. He insists he understand probability theory and how Occam's Razor works, but he still thinks it's an invalid argument.
I don't understand why. He's religious, and he says that Occam's Razor should prove God exists, then. Because it's easier to just say, "God did it." But I argued that God is a complex being.. ehh.
Does he not accept Occam's Razor at all, or just in this context?
If at all, there's the nice example of: "The sun rose every day of my life"---> "The sun rises every day" vs "The sun rose every day before now, and won't in the future"
If he doesn't like Occam in this particular case, do you have any idea why?
He doesn't accept it at all, no idea why.
There are a variety of problems with why "God did it' is actually discounted by Occam's razor. The issue here is somewhat subtle, but the basic idea is that "God did it" only seems like a simple hypothesis because of artifacts of human language. Any notion of "God" as usually used as an explanatory entity is actually an extremely complicated idea. Natural language doesn't reflect how complicated or simple something actually is. For example we have single words for "love" and "anger" and other emotional states that seem intuitively simple but actually are extremely complicated with a variety of predictions associated with them. It is only because of human intuition that such things seem simple. More careful formulations of Occam's razor such as using a Solomonoff prior will result in that hypothesis being registered as extremely complicated. (And in fact similar remarks apply to many versions of the "Matrix hypothesis".)
"goddidit" apparently predicts both A and NOT-A pretty well - so it isn't much use.
Occam's Razor is required reading for anyone who thinks Occam's Razor proves the existence of God.