Comment by srean
2 hours ago
I think you should get less annoyed.
> It’s not that the simplest is more likely to be correct, it’s that you should prefer it, because it’s simple.
I don't know what Occam meant, but if you accept the formalism of PAC learning, it is more likely to be correct
https://web.archive.org/web/20170428225156/http://www.cse.bu...
https://web.archive.org/web/20130412062821/http://cs.ecs.bay...
The notion of "simplicity" can be completely arbitrary, though. It's enough that there are only finitely many hypotheses simpler than the best hypothesis (assuming there's such a thing as a best hypothesis). So as you eliminate hypotheses incompatible with the data, at some point you'll have eliminated all simpler hypotheses, and the simplest hypothesis left will also be the best hypothesis. If simpler hypotheses are also more likely to be correct, you get there faster, but it's not required.
None of your links work for me.
Ah! from my very dated and messy bibtex file comments. Wait, let me search for them on archive.org.
Fixed.
There are also various metaphysical theories that posit that the universe is algorithmically generated in some sense or the other, and from many of those theories it follows that simplicity is a fundamental feature of reality, which yields an even stronger version of Occam’s Razor.