[FRIAM] ockham's razor losing its edge?

[glen]

Maybe it's just confirmation bias. But parsimony is either obsolete or a red herring. Perhaps it used to be useful when inference to the best explanation was our only choice. We didn't have the resources (or impetus) for multiverse analysis. Modern model selection executes a wide array of models and chooses the ones that best fit whatever task is at hand. Sure, there are still some resource limitations. But the primary bottleneck is type of observation bias I call "schema bias". Schema bias is the paradigm or framework of most familiarity to the modeler (or modeling team or entire community) that prevents them from including *other* types of models with which they're not familiar. I.e. there are parts of the schema that are accidentally fixed that could vary, were the scheme different. Proverbially, to a man with a hammer, every thing looks like a nail. Anything outside or fixed within one's schema is invisible.

But all this is a normal part of pluralism, a concept we've beaten to death on this list. But I've found a new advocate that I hadn't seen before, which is why I'm taking one more whack at the dead body of monism in this post:

https://chrisstroop.wordpress.com/2020/05/26/a-personal-update-and-some-thoughts-on-pluralism/

Granted, she's talking about religion. But it's only a hop, skip, and jump from there to logics, modeling methods, or no-go theorems about the universe.


On 1/30/25 9:23 AM, Roger Critchlow wrote:
> This was in the Complexity Digest feed this morning, it looks like fun.
> 
> https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2401230121 <https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2401230121>
> 
> What makes a model good or bad or useful or risible?


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