Did you look up the papers he referenced, then? Or are you speaking just based on your impression of his summaries? I too thought that his summaries were potentially misleading, but I failed to track down the papers he mentioned to verify that for certain.
I'm not sure if this is really an interesting thing to say, however - when talking about the actual phenomena, they are neither really simple nor complex. They have a single true explanation. It's only when humans are trying to establish the explanation based on limited observation that simplicity and complexity come into it.
This perspective is new to me. What are your thoughts on things like Salmonoff induction? It seems to me like that's sufficiently abstract that it requires simplicity is a meaningful idea even outside the human psyche. I cannot really imagine any thinking-like process that doesn't involve notions of simplicity.
The first paper he mentions in the machine learning section can be found here, if you'd like to take a look: Murphy and Pazzani 1994 I had more trouble finding the others which he briefly mentions, and so relied on his summary for those.
As for the 'complexity of phenomena rather than theories' bit I was talking about, your reminder of Solomonoff induction has made me change my mind, and perhaps we can talk about 'complexity' when it comes to the phenomena themselves after all.
My initial mindset (reworded with Solomonoff induction in mind) was this: Given a...
This essay claims to refute a popularized understanding of Occam's Razor that I myself adhere to. It is confusing me, since I hold this belief at a very deep level that it's difficult for me to examine. Does anyone see any problems in its argument, or does it seem compelling? I specifically feel as though it might be summarizing the relevant Machine Learning research badly, but I'm not very familiar with the field. It also might be failing to give any credit to simplicity as a general heuristic when simplicity succeeds in a specific field, and it's unclear whether such credit would be justified. Finally, my intuition is that situations in nature where there is a steady bias towards growing complexity are more common than the author claims, and that such tendencies are stronger for longer. However, for all of this, I have no clear evidence to back up the ideas in my head, just vague notions that are difficult to examine. I'd appreciate someone else's perspective on this, as mine seems to be distorted.
Essay: http://bruce.edmonds.name/sinti/