Johnicholas comments on No, Really, I've Deceived Myself - Less Wrong

55 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 04 March 2009 11:29PM

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Comment author: Jack 05 March 2009 10:06:31AM 4 points [-]

Occam's Razor is a heuristic... and one I proceed according to- but its not at all clear just what its justification is. Why exactly ought we to believe the simpler hypothesis?

Comment author: Johnicholas 05 March 2009 11:36:01AM 8 points [-]

You move from simpler hypotheses to more complex hypotheses for the same reason that you count from small numbers to big numbers.

Try imagining what counting the natural numbers "in the opposite order" would look like.

Of course, you can have large wiggles. For example, you might alternate jumping up to the next power of two and counting backwards. But using different representations for hypotheses leads to the same sort of wiggles in Occam's Razor.