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Will_Newsome comments on Rationality Quotes September 2012 - Less Wrong
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— Michael Kirkbride / Vivec, "The Thirty Six Lessons of Vivec", Morrowind.
Am I the only one who thinks we should stop using the word "simple" for Occam's Razor / Solomonoff's Whatever? In 99% of use-cases by actual humans, it doesn't mean Solomonoff induction, so it's confusing.
Yeah, various smart people have made that point repeatedly, but Eliezer and Luke aren't listening and most people learn their words from Eliezer and Luke, so the community is still being sorta silly in that regard.
How would you characterise the in your opinion most prevalent use-cases?
"Easy to communicate to other humans", "easy to understand", or "having few parts".
"Having few parts" is what Occam's razor seems to be going for. We can speak specifically of "burdensome details," but I can't think of a one-word replacement for "simple" used in this sense.
It is a problem that people tend to use "simple" to mean "intuitive" or "easy to understand," and "complicated" to mean "counterintuitive." Based on the "official" definitions, quantum mechanics and mathematics are extremely simple while human emotions are exceedingly complex.
I think human beings have internalized a crude version of Occam's Razor that works for most normal social situations - the absurdity heuristic. We use it to see through elaborate, highly improbable excuses, for example. It just misfires when dealing with deeper physical reality because its focus is on minds and emotions. Hence, two different, nearly opposite meanings of the word "simple."