“I am not sure if my understanding of Occam’s
Razor matches Eliezer Yudkowsky’s.
I understand it more as (to use a mechanical
analogy) “don’t add any more parts to a
machine than are needed to make it work
properly.”
Think of Kolmogorov complexity: the most parsimonious hypothesis is the one that can generate the data using the least number of bits when fed into a Turing machine.
“One way is to appeal to Occam’s Razor. Let us prefer the simpler hypothesis that increases to the minimum wage are random. That is bogus.”
Why it is bogus? An ideal stock market, operating over a fixed resource base, must necessarily be random (or at least pseudorandom). If it had any patterns distinguishable by investors, people would exploit those patterns to make money, and in the process eliminate them. The same principle could apply here: the minute a politician discovers a pattern in the economy, he begins exploiting it to get votes, and so erases the pattern by selectively hacking off the parts of it the voters consider bad.
“I am not sure if my understanding of Occam’s Razor matches Eliezer Yudkowsky’s.
I understand it more as (to use a mechanical analogy) “don’t add any more parts to a machine than are needed to make it work properly.”
Think of Kolmogorov complexity: the most parsimonious hypothesis is the one that can generate the data using the least number of bits when fed into a Turing machine.
“One way is to appeal to Occam’s Razor. Let us prefer the simpler hypothesis that increases to the minimum wage are random. That is bogus.”
Why it is bogus? An ideal stock market, operating over a fixed resource base, must necessarily be random (or at least pseudorandom). If it had any patterns distinguishable by investors, people would exploit those patterns to make money, and in the process eliminate them. The same principle could apply here: the minute a politician discovers a pattern in the economy, he begins exploiting it to get votes, and so erases the pattern by selectively hacking off the parts of it the voters consider bad.