I agree with the principle but I’m not sure I’d call it “Occam’s razor”. Occam’s razor is a bit sketchy, it’s not really a guarantee of anything, it’s not a mathematical law, it’s like a rule of thumb or something. Here you have a much more solid argument: multiplying many probabilities into a conjunction makes the result smaller and smaller. That’s a mathematical law, rock-solid. So I’d go with that...
My point was more that “people generally call both of these kinds of reasoning ‘Occam’s razor’, and they’re both good ways to reason, but they work differently.”
Oh, hmm, I guess that’s fair, now that you mention it I do recall hearing a talk where someone used “Occam’s razor” to talk about the solomonoff prior. Actually he called it “Bayes Occam’s razor” I think. He was talking about a probabilistic programming algorithm.
That’s (1) not physics, and (2) includes (as a special case) penalizing conjunctions, so maybe related to what you said. Or sorry if I’m still not getting what you meant
I agree with the principle but I’m not sure I’d call it “Occam’s razor”. Occam’s razor is a bit sketchy, it’s not really a guarantee of anything, it’s not a mathematical law, it’s like a rule of thumb or something. Here you have a much more solid argument: multiplying many probabilities into a conjunction makes the result smaller and smaller. That’s a mathematical law, rock-solid. So I’d go with that...
My point was more that “people generally call both of these kinds of reasoning ‘Occam’s razor’, and they’re both good ways to reason, but they work differently.”
Oh, hmm, I guess that’s fair, now that you mention it I do recall hearing a talk where someone used “Occam’s razor” to talk about the solomonoff prior. Actually he called it “Bayes Occam’s razor” I think. He was talking about a probabilistic programming algorithm.
That’s (1) not physics, and (2) includes (as a special case) penalizing conjunctions, so maybe related to what you said. Or sorry if I’m still not getting what you meant