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tbwilsonky wrote:yeah.

in seminars, panel discussions, and teaching, 'the razor' - in my experience - is often used as a cheap argumentative parlor trick. at a very basic level it allows people to side-step any real explication by privileging brevity; as if being discursively thrifty is somehow more analytically rigorous than...well...rigor.

pigsteak wrote:

tbwilsonky wrote:yeah.

in seminars, panel discussions, and teaching, 'the razor' - in my experience - is often used as a cheap argumentative parlor trick. at a very basic level it allows people to side-step any real explication by privileging brevity; as if being discursively thrifty is somehow more analytically rigorous than...well...rigor.

big dollar words for a climbing forum don't cha think?

pigsteak wrote:

tbwilsonky wrote:yeah.

in seminars, panel discussions, and teaching, 'the razor' - in my experience - is often used as a cheap argumentative parlor trick. at a very basic level it allows people to side-step any real explication by privileging brevity; as if being discursively thrifty is somehow more analytically rigorous than...well...rigor.

big dollar words for a climbing forum don't cha think?

tbwilsonky wrote:

Clevis Hitch wrote: Occam's razor (or Ockham's razor[1]), often expressed in Latin as the lex parsimoniae, translating to law of parsimony, law of economy or law of succinctness, is a principle that generally recommends selecting the competing hypothesis that makes the fewest new assumptions, when the hypotheses are equal in other respects.[2] For instance, they must both sufficiently explain available data in the first place.

The principle is often inaccurately summarized as "the simplest explanation is most likely the correct one". This summary is misleading, however, since the principle is actually focused on shifting the burden of proof in discussions.[3] That is, the razor is a principle that suggests we should tend towards simpler theories (see justifications section below) until we can trade some simplicity for increased explanatory power. Contrary to the popular summary, the simplest available theory is sometimes a less accurate explanation. Philosophers also add that the exact meaning of "simplest" can be nuanced in the first place.[4]

Occam's razor is attributed to the 14th-century English logician, theologian and Franciscan friar Father William of Ockham (d'Okham) although the principle was familiar long before.[5] The words attributed to Occam are "entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity" (entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem), although these actual words are not to be found in his extant works.[6] The saying is also phrased as pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate ("plurality should not be posited without necessity").[7] To quote Isaac Newton, "We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances. Therefore, to the same natural effects we must, so far as possible, assign the same causes."[8]

In science, Occam’s razor is used as a heuristic (general guiding rule) to guide scientists in the development of theoretical models rather than as an arbiter between published models.[9][10] In the scientific method, Occam's razor is not considered an irrefutable principle of logic, and certainly not a scientific result.[11][12][13][14]

In 2005 Marcus Hutter mathematically proved[15] that shorter computable theories have more weight when calculating the expected value of an action across all computable theories which perfectly describe previous observations.



I wish you were half as smart as you thought you were, maybe you'd be worth something other than a punch-line...

awesome. you watched the 2nd season of House, have a computer, and know about wikipedia.

talk about a punch line.