Marcus Hutter

So Occam's Razor says that you should not multiply entities beyond necessity, which sort of, if you translate that into proper English, means, and, you know, in the scientific context, means that if you have two theories or hypotheses or models which equally well describe the phenomenon you're studying or the data, you should choose the more simple one.

I believe that Occam's razor is...

probably the most important principle in science.

I mean, of course, we need logical deduction and we do experimental design, but science is about understanding the world, finding models of the world, and we can come up with crazy complex models which explain everything but predict nothing, but the simple model seem to have predictive power, and it's a valid question why.

And

There are two answers to that.

You can just accept it, that is the principle of science, and we use this principle and it seems to be successful.

We don't know why, but it just happens to be.

Or you can try, you know, find another principle which explains Occam's razor.

And if we start with the assumption that the world is governed by simple rules,

then there's a bias towards simplicity and applying Occam's Razor

is the mechanism to finding these rules.

And actually in a more quantitative sense, and we come back to that later in case of somnolence reduction, you can rigorously prove that.

If you assume that the world is simple, then Occam's razor is the best you can do in a certain sense.

I guess mostly.

In general, many things can be explained by an evolutionary argument.

And, you know, there's some artifacts in humans which are just artifacts and not necessarily necessary.

But with this beauty and simplicity, it's, I believe,

At least the core is about, like science, finding regularities in the world, understanding the world, which is necessary for survival, right?

a bush right and i just see noise and there is a tiger right and eats me then i'm dead but if i try to find a pattern and we know that humans are prone to um find more patterns in data than they are you know like the mars face and all these things um but this bias towards finding patterns even if they are non but i mean it's best of course if they are yeah helps us for survival