If you want to discuss or debate an issue to resolution/conclusion with me, explicitly ask for that. I'm open, by request, to putting major effort into resolving disagreements.
Anecdote time: after a long discussion about the existence of any form of induction , on a CR forum, someone eventually popped up who had asked KRP the very question, after bumping into him at a conference many years ago , and his reply was that it existed , but wasn't suitable for science.
Source?
What anyone else thinks? I am very familiar with popular CR since I used to hang out in the same forums as Curi. I've also read some if the great man's works.
Which forums? Under what name?
Li and Vitanyi write:
Can a thing be simple under one definition of simplicity and not simple under another? The contemporary philosopher Karl R. Popper (1902– 1994) has said that Occam’s razor is without sense, since there is no objective criterion for simplicity. Popper states that every such proposed criterion will necessarily be biased and subjective.
There's no citation. There's one Popper book in the references section, LScD, but it doesn't contain the string "occam" (case insensitive search).
I also searched a whole folder of many Popper books and found nothing mentioning Occam (except it's mentioned by other people, not Popper, in the Schlipp volumes).
If Popper actually said something about Occam's razor, I'd like to read it. Any idea what's going on? This seems like a scholarship problem from Li and Vitanyi. They also dismiss Popper's solution to the problem of induction as unsatisfactory, with no explanation, argument, cite, etc.
Which section of the 850 page book contains a clear explanation of this? On initial review they seem to talk about hypotheses, for hundreds of pages, without trying to define them or explain what sorts of things do and do not qualify or how Solomonoff hypotheses do and do not match the common sense meaning of a hypothesis.
Thanks. So "There are no black swans." is not a valid Solomonoff hypothesis? A hypothesis can't exclude things, only make positive predictions?
Is a hypothesis allowed to make partial predictions? E.g. predict some pixels or frames and leave others unspecified. If so, then you could "and" together two partial hypotheses and run into a similar math consistency problem, right? But the way you said it sounds like a valid hypothesis may be required to predict absolutely everything, which would prevent conjoining two hypotheses since they're already both complete and nothing more could be added.
I have never sock puppeted at LW and I have never been banned at the LW website. You're just wrong and smearing me.
Please leave me alone.
We're discussing social dynamics and rational conversations at http://curi.us/2363-discussion-with-gigahurt-from-less-wrong
past misbehaviors with sock puppets
What sock puppets?
People also reject ideas before they've been explored in depth. I've tried to discuss similar issues with LW before but the basic response was roughly "we like chaos where no one pays attention to whether an argument has ever been answered by anyone; we all just do our own thing with no attempt at comprehensiveness or organizing who does what; having organized leadership of any sort, or anyone who is responsible for anything, would be irrational" (plus some suggestions that I'm low social status and that therefore I personally deserve to be ignored. there were also suggestions – phrased rather differently but amounting to this – that LW will listen more if published ideas are rewritten, not to improve on any flaws, but so that the new versions can be published at LW before anywhere else, because the LW community's attention allocation is highly biased towards that).