I like this as a parable. I’ve been talking to several people trying to explain cosmology and Occam’s razor and why the default position should be “I don’t know” instead of “I don’t know therefore X” but they just don’t seem to get it. Instead of trying to start the conversation with life, the universe, and everything, I should probably start with an example like the George the Giant story above. It should be relatively easy for them to see why George the Giant was a bad belief, even though it satisfied the four criteria (i.e., because it fail’s Occam’s razor and there’s no reason to elevate it above an infinite number of similarly complex answers)
I like this as a parable. I’ve been talking to several people trying to explain cosmology and Occam’s razor and why the default position should be “I don’t know” instead of “I don’t know therefore X” but they just don’t seem to get it. Instead of trying to start the conversation with life, the universe, and everything, I should probably start with an example like the George the Giant story above. It should be relatively easy for them to see why George the Giant was a bad belief, even though it satisfied the four criteria (i.e., because it fail’s Occam’s razor and there’s no reason to elevate it above an infinite number of similarly complex answers)