dlthomas comments on Expecting Short Inferential Distances - Less Wrong

107 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 22 October 2007 11:42PM

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Comment author: Arandur 31 July 2011 07:30:58PM 1 point [-]

Not necessarily. The introduction of God into the story actually makes the theory quite a bit more complex, as far as amount of information stored goes. The length of time it takes to explain your theory does not necessarily correlate to how simple it is. "God did it" is monumentally more complex than "The random process of natural selection ensures that those organisms which have mutations that lend them a better chance of survival will, on average, be more likely to survive and pass those mutated genes on to the next generation than an organism without beneficial mutations, etc etc etc."

Though actually, if you look closely at the two arguments above, they don't necessarily contradict each other. :3 I personally feel that "God did it" is a simpler explanation than "Amino acids magically combined via processes we don't understand and haven't been able to duplicate, creating life essentially ex nihilo"... but that doesn't at all mean taht either of these explanations are objectively simple!

Comment author: dlthomas 09 November 2011 12:58:45AM 0 points [-]

Once you have posited a God to take care of the creation of the amino acids, "God did it" becomes much simpler an explanation of the rest - referring to an entity that has been established to exist is not a terribly long message.