To clarify, what I think is underappreciated (and what’s seemingly being missed in Eliezer’s statement about his belief that the future is similar to the past), isn’t that justifying an Occamian prior is necessary or equivalent to solving the original Problem of Induction, but that it’s a smaller and more tractable problem which is sufficient to resolve everything that needs to be resolved.
Edit: I’ve expanded on the Problem of Occam’s Razor section in the post:
In my view, it’s a significant and under-appreciated milestone that we’ve reduced the original Problem of Induction to the problem of justifying Occam’s Razor. We’ve managed to drop two confusing aspects from the original PoI:
We don’t have to justify using “similarity”, “resemblance”, or “collecting a bunch of confirming observations”, because we know those things aren’t key to how science actually works.
We don’t have to justify “the future resembling the past” per se. We only have to justify that the universe allows intelligent agents to learn probabilistic models that are better than maximum-entropy belief states.
We don’t have to justify using “similarity”, “resemblance”
I think you still do. In terms of induction, you still have the problem of grue and bleen. In terms of Occams Razor, it’s the problem of which language a description needs to be simple in.
Justifying that blue is an a-priori more likely concept than grue is part of the remaining problem of justifying Occam’s Razor. What we don’t have to justify is the wrong claim that science operates based on generalized observations of similarity.
To clarify, what I think is underappreciated (and what’s seemingly being missed in Eliezer’s statement about his belief that the future is similar to the past), isn’t that justifying an Occamian prior is necessary or equivalent to solving the original Problem of Induction, but that it’s a smaller and more tractable problem which is sufficient to resolve everything that needs to be resolved.
Edit: I’ve expanded on the Problem of Occam’s Razor section in the post:
I think you still do. In terms of induction, you still have the problem of grue and bleen. In terms of Occams Razor, it’s the problem of which language a description needs to be simple in.
Justifying that blue is an a-priori more likely concept than grue is part of the remaining problem of justifying Occam’s Razor. What we don’t have to justify is the wrong claim that science operates based on generalized observations of similarity.