Yeah, good point. The intuition I want to point at here is “general relativity was simpler than Newtonian mechanics + ad-hoc adjustments for Mercury’s orbit”. But I do think it’s a little tricky to pin down the sense in which it’s simpler. E.g. what if you didn’t actually have any candidate explanations for why Mercury’s orbit was a bit off? (But you’d perhaps always have some hypothesis like “experimental error”, I guess.)
I’m currently playing around with the notion that, instead of simplicity, we’re actually optimizing for something like “well-foundedness”, i.e. the ability to derive everything from a small set of premises. But this feels close enough to simplicity that maybe I should just think of this as one version of simplicity.
Yeah, good point. The intuition I want to point at here is “general relativity was simpler than Newtonian mechanics + ad-hoc adjustments for Mercury’s orbit”. But I do think it’s a little tricky to pin down the sense in which it’s simpler. E.g. what if you didn’t actually have any candidate explanations for why Mercury’s orbit was a bit off? (But you’d perhaps always have some hypothesis like “experimental error”, I guess.)
I’m currently playing around with the notion that, instead of simplicity, we’re actually optimizing for something like “well-foundedness”, i.e. the ability to derive everything from a small set of premises. But this feels close enough to simplicity that maybe I should just think of this as one version of simplicity.