michael_vassar3 comments on Rational vs. Scientific Ev-Psych - Less Wrong

19 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 04 January 2008 07:01AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (49)

Sort By: Old

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: michael_vassar3 04 January 2008 03:29:44PM 1 point [-]

Nathan: A new theory that matches old data is likely to be more complex than an old theory that matches old data because the old theory is probably the first that someone thought of and bothered publishing. This justifies some conservatism, but not so much. The effort required to revise beliefs or to hold them as a Bayes net is a further justification, but still justifies much less conservatism than is seen.

OTOH, I disagree with your dark matter example. The case for dark matter over weird physics actually seems fairly compelling to me, though this probably isn't the place to discuss it.