A lot of excellent points in this post. I particularly like the one about having feelings about one’s own feelings, which is something I think I’ve always understood on some level but perhaps the first time I thought about it consciously was from Seth Rogan’s line in 40-Year-Old Virgin: “[Y]our depression is boring me for one thing, and it’s actually making me a little depressed, which is then in turn making me more depressed that you’re actually affecting my mood.”
I think posts like this prove a more general point: we humans are thinking on many levels of meta, all the time, and insistence on pulling the levels apart to examine separately isn’t “complicating things”; it’s just a way of seeing more clearly what’s already in our line of vision.
Sure, but the fact that the probability distribution is skewed in favor of simpler (i.e. more “beautiful”) explanations by Occam’s Razor is equivalent to saying that there should be such a bias—after all, bias is essentially just a skewing of one’s probability function. Of course this bias shouldn’t be taken to the extreme of assuming that just because one hypothesis is more beautiful than others, it automatically qualifies as the correct explanation. But discrediting such an extreme mindset doesn’t mean that a mild bias in favor of “beauty” is discredited.