Thanks for this! Apparently, among many economists Occam’s Razor is viewed as just a modelling trick, judging from the conversations on Reddit I’ve had recently. I’d felt that perspective was incorrect for a while, but after encountering it so many times, and then later on being directed to this paper, I’d begun to fear my epistemology was built on shaky foundations. It’s relieving to see that’s not the case.
It turns out there’s an extremely straightforward mathematical reason why simplicity is to some extent an indicator of high probability.
Is there anything ruling out a bias towards simplicity that is extremely small, or are there good reasons to think the bias would be rather large? Figuring out how much predictive accuracy to exchange for theory conciseness seems like a tough problem, possibly requiring some arbitrariness.
Thanks for this! Apparently, among many economists Occam’s Razor is viewed as just a modelling trick, judging from the conversations on Reddit I’ve had recently. I’d felt that perspective was incorrect for a while, but after encountering it so many times, and then later on being directed to this paper, I’d begun to fear my epistemology was built on shaky foundations. It’s relieving to see that’s not the case.
Is there anything ruling out a bias towards simplicity that is extremely small, or are there good reasons to think the bias would be rather large? Figuring out how much predictive accuracy to exchange for theory conciseness seems like a tough problem, possibly requiring some arbitrariness.