Quarkster comments on Where Recursive Justification Hits Bottom - Less Wrong

41 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 08 July 2008 10:16AM

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Comment author: Quarkster 01 December 2009 01:00:42AM *  1 point [-]

You got my meaning. I have a bad habit of under-explaining things.

As far as the second part goes, I'm wary of the math. While I would imagine that your argument would tend to work out much of the time, it certainly isn't a proof, and Bayes' Theorem doesn't deal with the respective complexity of the canonical events A and B except to say that they are each more probable individually than separately. Issues of what is meant by the complexity of the events also arise. I suspect that if your assertion was easy to prove, then it would have been proven by now and mentioned in the main entry.

Thus, while Occam's razor may follow from Bayes' theorem in certain cases, I am far from satisfied that it does for all cases.