Gray_Area comments on A Priori - Less Wrong

32 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 08 October 2007 09:02PM

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Comment author: Gray_Area 09 October 2007 04:37:18AM 0 points [-]

I think a discussion of what people mean exactly when they invoke Occam's Razor would be great, though it's probably a large enough topic to deserve its own thread.

The notion of hypothesis parsimony is, I think, a very subtle one. For example, Nick Tarleton above claimed that 'causal closure' is 'the most parsimonious hypothesis.' At some other point, Eliezer claimed the multi-world interpretation of quantum mechanics as the most parsimonious. This isn't obvious! How is parsimony measured? Would some version of Chalmers' dualism really be less parsimonious? How will we agree on a procedure to compare 'hypothesis size?' How much should we value 'God' vs 'the anthropic landscape' favored at Stanford?