Solomonoff induction gives you a weighted sum over an infinite number of programs[1]. That’s not compact. And if were computable, which it isn’t, or even approximable, which it probably isn’t for this case, I doubt you’d be able to collect enough data in your lifetime for it to converge to speak of. Not even assuming that you were able to reliably collect all relevant data, which you’re not, and that you were actually encoding or processing the data in a formal way, which you’re also not.
And if you actually did somehow get your hands around a Solomonoff sum, you still wouldn’t be able to just grab a single term out of it, not even the one for the shortest program, and substitute it as “the” explanation on the grounds that “Solomonoff induction works”.
I can understand “compact generation” as a metaphorical allusion to Occam, but seriously, Solomoff induction isn’t even useful as a metaphor for any well-chosen approach here. You can’t let formalisms like that invade your thinking to the point where you seriously think in terms of them in areas where it doesn’t make sense.
Also, human social behavior probably isn’t deterministically Turing computable even if you model the entire universe. Probabilistically computable, probably, yes. In theory. And to be fair I’m sure Solomonoff goes through just fine to nondeterministic Turing processes. But anyway, you don’t actually have, and can’t actually get, a machine that computes human behavior or even a meaningful approximation to it.
There’s also no anti-inductive prior involved. What I’m saying isn’t about the underlying phenomena at all, and certainly doesn’t say that there’s no regularity in them. It’s about the theory, and it has in fact happened, far more often than not in my experience, that simple, single-explanation, “compact” theories, yield really bogus results.
Which is actually capable of encoding “lots of different, interacting things are going on” in a way that a single, deterministic Turing program would not be.
Solomonoff induction gives you a weighted sum over an infinite number of programs [1] . That’s not compact. And if were computable, which it isn’t, or even approximable, which it probably isn’t for this case, I doubt you’d be able to collect enough data in your lifetime for it to converge to speak of. Not even assuming that you were able to reliably collect all relevant data, which you’re not, and that you were actually encoding or processing the data in a formal way, which you’re also not.
And if you actually did somehow get your hands around a Solomonoff sum, you still wouldn’t be able to just grab a single term out of it, not even the one for the shortest program, and substitute it as “the” explanation on the grounds that “Solomonoff induction works”.
I can understand “compact generation” as a metaphorical allusion to Occam, but seriously, Solomoff induction isn’t even useful as a metaphor for any well-chosen approach here. You can’t let formalisms like that invade your thinking to the point where you seriously think in terms of them in areas where it doesn’t make sense.
Also, human social behavior probably isn’t deterministically Turing computable even if you model the entire universe. Probabilistically computable, probably, yes. In theory. And to be fair I’m sure Solomonoff goes through just fine to nondeterministic Turing processes. But anyway, you don’t actually have, and can’t actually get, a machine that computes human behavior or even a meaningful approximation to it.
There’s also no anti-inductive prior involved. What I’m saying isn’t about the underlying phenomena at all, and certainly doesn’t say that there’s no regularity in them. It’s about the theory, and it has in fact happened, far more often than not in my experience, that simple, single-explanation, “compact” theories, yield really bogus results.
Which is actually capable of encoding “lots of different, interacting things are going on” in a way that a single, deterministic Turing program would not be.
The point is that the sum is inversely weighted by compactness, not that the sum is itself compact.