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Lumifer comments on Is simplicity truth indicative? - Less Wrong
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After giving myself some time to think about this, I think you are right and my argument was flawed. On the other hand, I still think there's a sense in which simplicity in explanations is superior to complexity, even though I can't produce any good arguments for that idea.
I would probably argue that the complexity of explanations should match the complexity of the phenomenon you're trying to describe.
After a couple months more thought, I still feel as though there should be some more general sense in which simplicity is better. Maybe because it's easier to find simple explanations that approximately match complex truths than to find complex explanations that approximately match simple truths, so even when you're dealing with a domain filled with complex phenomena it's better to use simplicity. On the other hand, perhaps the notion that approximations matter or can be meaningfully compared across domains of different complexity is begging the question somehow.