In fact, an anti-Occam prior is impossible. As I’ve mentioned before, as long as you’re talking about anything that has any remote resemblance to something we might call simplicity, things can decrease in simplicity indefinitely, but there is a limit to increase. In other words, you can only get so simple, but you can always get more complicated. So if you assign a one-to-one correspondence between the natural numbers and potential claims, it follows of necessity that as the natural numbers go to infinity, the complexity of the corresponding claims goes to infinity as well. And if you assign a probability to each claim, while making your probabilities sum to 1, then the probability of the more and more complex claims will go to 0 in the limit.
In other words, Occam’s Razor is a logical necessity.
I think it would be possible to have an anti-Occam prior if the total complexity of the universe is bounded.
Suppose we list integers according to an unknown rule, and we favor rules with high complexity. Given the problem statement, we should take an anti-Occam prior to determine the rule given the list of integers. It doesn’t diverge because the list has finite length, so the complexity is bounded.
Scaling up, the universe presumably has a finite number of possible configurations given any prior information. If we additionally had information that led us to take an Anti-Occam prior, it would not diverge.
In fact, an anti-Occam prior is impossible. As I’ve mentioned before, as long as you’re talking about anything that has any remote resemblance to something we might call simplicity, things can decrease in simplicity indefinitely, but there is a limit to increase. In other words, you can only get so simple, but you can always get more complicated. So if you assign a one-to-one correspondence between the natural numbers and potential claims, it follows of necessity that as the natural numbers go to infinity, the complexity of the corresponding claims goes to infinity as well. And if you assign a probability to each claim, while making your probabilities sum to 1, then the probability of the more and more complex claims will go to 0 in the limit.
In other words, Occam’s Razor is a logical necessity.
I think it would be possible to have an anti-Occam prior if the total complexity of the universe is bounded.
Suppose we list integers according to an unknown rule, and we favor rules with high complexity. Given the problem statement, we should take an anti-Occam prior to determine the rule given the list of integers. It doesn’t diverge because the list has finite length, so the complexity is bounded.
Scaling up, the universe presumably has a finite number of possible configurations given any prior information. If we additionally had information that led us to take an Anti-Occam prior, it would not diverge.