Qiaochu_Yuan 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: Yosarian2 31 December 2012 11:20:26PM *  0 points [-]

I will admit that I'm struggling a bit here, because I'm having trouble coming up with a coherent mental picture of what a legitimate alternate hypothesis to Occam's razor would actually look like.

In fact, if you take my hypothesis to be true, then Occam's razor would still fundamentally hold, at least in the simplest form of "a less complicated theory is more likely to be true then a more complicated", since if "theory-space A" is smaller then "theory-space B", then any given point in theory-space A is more likely to be true then any given point in theory-space B even if the answer has an equal chance of being in space A as it does of being in space B. So I think my original hypothesis actually itself reduces to Occam's Razor.

I think this is where I just say oops and drop this whole train of thought.

Comment author: Qiaochu_Yuan 31 December 2012 11:24:15PM *  1 point [-]

Here's one. The universe is a particularly perverse simulation, largely controlled by a sequence of pseudorandom number generators. This sequence of PRNGs gets steadily more and more Kolmogorov-complicated (the superbeings that run us love complicated forms of torture), so even if we figured out how a given one worked the next one would already be in play, and it is totally unrelated, so we'd have to start all over. Occam's razor fails badly in such a universe because the explanation for any particular thing happening gets more complicated over time.

In other words, Quirrell-whistling writ large.

Comment author: BerryPick6 01 January 2013 05:13:48AM 0 points [-]

I guess we could test this one by looking at successful explanations over time and seeing whether their complexity increases at a steady rate? Then again, I can already find two or three holes in that test...

Hmm. This is a tricky one.