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hairyfigment comments on A Priori - Less Wrong
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Ah. Yeah that does clear things up a bit. What would a solution look like, then? To show the complexity of an idea impacts its probability... but unless you use the historic argument of 'it's looked that way in the past for stuff like this' I don't see any way of even approaching that.
What if we imagine the space of hypotheses? A simpler hypothesis would be a larger circle because there may be more specific rules that act in accordance with it. 'The strength of a hypothesis is not what it can explain, but what it fails to account for', so a complicated prediction should occupy a very tiny region and therefore have a tiny probability.
Or... is that just another version of Solomonoff Induction, and so the same thing?
Near as I can tell, you're describing the same conjunction rule from your previous comment!
This conjunction rule says that a claim like 'The laws of physics always hold,' has less probability than, 'The laws of physics hold up until September 25, 2015 (whether or not they continue to hold after).'
Solomonoff Induction is an attempt to find a rule that says, 'OK, but the first claim accounts for nearly all of the probability assigned to the second claim.'
Hrm, yeah. I think I need more tools and experience to be able to think about this properly.