The classic example of a hypothesis explaining more being less likely would of course be conspiracy theories, where adherents add more and more details under the false assumption that this makes the theory more likely rather than less likely.
However, when we have multiple phenomena that follow a similar pattern, isn’t it simpler and more likely that there’s only one cause for both situations?
Is it possible that in some circumstances it could be more unlikely that the pattern is completely coincidental?
It seems like the problem with conspiratorial thinking isn’t that they explain more with less, but that they can selectively pull their facts from a wide range of fact space. Similar to how you can take advantage of people’s tribe-brain and narrative thinking to make them think that surgeons are evil, if you want to tell a story about how sugar companies are taking over the world, you can probably find some number of world leaders with ties to Big Glucose.
[Question] Are explanations that explain more phenomena always more unlikely than narrower versions?
The classic example of a hypothesis explaining more being less likely would of course be conspiracy theories, where adherents add more and more details under the false assumption that this makes the theory more likely rather than less likely.
However, when we have multiple phenomena that follow a similar pattern, isn’t it simpler and more likely that there’s only one cause for both situations?
Is it possible that in some circumstances it could be more unlikely that the pattern is completely coincidental?
It seems like the problem with conspiratorial thinking isn’t that they explain more with less, but that they can selectively pull their facts from a wide range of fact space. Similar to how you can take advantage of people’s tribe-brain and narrative thinking to make them think that surgeons are evil, if you want to tell a story about how sugar companies are taking over the world, you can probably find some number of world leaders with ties to Big Glucose.