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Re:Münchhausen trilemma by Fnoord on Friday May 11, 2018 @07:08AM (#17046313)
Seems to be the same principle as Occam's razor [1] or am I missing something?

[1] https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor

Re:Münchhausen trilemma by xelxebar on Friday May 11, 2018 @08:00AM (#17046584)
In spirit, yes. However, it gets more interesting if we try to make Occam's Razor more precise with something like Solomonoff induction, then it get's trickier to decide in practice what "simpler" actually means.

Even if we're able to reduce our competing models to Turing machine implementations, we're only able to calculate their complexity relative to some defined collection of models, which in turn depends on what kind of low-level logical formalism we're using.

In practice, of course, we can't parse out all these formal details for every decision, but I think it's helpful to at least be aware of the inherent problems with naive Occam's Razor.

Re:Münchhausen trilemma by paulific on Friday May 11, 2018 @08:01AM (#17046596)
Occam's razor is better thought of as a method of choosing between alternative explanations of the same observed phenomena. It suggests choose the one that requires the least unproved theoretical scaffolding to support it. It is not really "accept the simplest explanation" but more like "do not create complex theories unless they explain the facts better than the simple ones."