Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on My Kind of Reflection - Less Wrong

17 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 10 July 2008 07:21AM

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Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 10 July 2008 10:05:39AM 1 point [-]

Lake, Occam's Razor could be described as a "premise" instead of a "rule", since it can be viewed as a Bayesian prior - so can many kinds of induction.

Will, just as we've refined our understanding of Occam's Razor, we've also refined our understanding of induction. In particular, we've observed that the fundamental laws appear to be absolutely stable, universal, and precise; and whenever we observe a seeming exception, it turns out that there's a deeper and absolutely universal fundamental rule. More perfectly stable rules on basic levels of organization, of course, take priority on induction over surface levels of organization. We now have a justification for why surface induction works imperfectly, in terms of the apparent perfect regularity of the fundamental level.