Seems analogous to the concept of elegance in modern math and science. I’m not sure if we should interpret the characteristic Greek speculation about symmetries as a violation of Occam’s Razor—it’s certainly not empirically founded, but it’s not clear to me that it’d increase the K-complexity or any of the other usual complexity measures when applied to the rather fuzzily defined Greek models of the world.
The addition of an extra planet, empirically unobserved and claimed to be hidden from observers, just to have the celestial body count add up to a “good” number, seems like a pretty clear Occam’s Razor violation to me.
Conceded, but only because the specific mechanics of the Counter-Earth proposal were rather far-fetched.
In Classical times, so little was known about the actual mechanics underlying natural phenomena that an emphasis on fitting those phenomena into mathematical symmetries would be productive, even if there were some holes in the data. There simply wasn’t that much rigorous data to study, and even fewer well-understood analytical tools to do it with, so I’d expect some real symmetries to look awkward in practice thanks to sampling bias. I think the Greek philosophers had some idea of this, too.
Seems analogous to the concept of elegance in modern math and science. I’m not sure if we should interpret the characteristic Greek speculation about symmetries as a violation of Occam’s Razor—it’s certainly not empirically founded, but it’s not clear to me that it’d increase the K-complexity or any of the other usual complexity measures when applied to the rather fuzzily defined Greek models of the world.
The addition of an extra planet, empirically unobserved and claimed to be hidden from observers, just to have the celestial body count add up to a “good” number, seems like a pretty clear Occam’s Razor violation to me.
Conceded, but only because the specific mechanics of the Counter-Earth proposal were rather far-fetched.
In Classical times, so little was known about the actual mechanics underlying natural phenomena that an emphasis on fitting those phenomena into mathematical symmetries would be productive, even if there were some holes in the data. There simply wasn’t that much rigorous data to study, and even fewer well-understood analytical tools to do it with, so I’d expect some real symmetries to look awkward in practice thanks to sampling bias. I think the Greek philosophers had some idea of this, too.