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My understanding of Occam’s Razor is: “Given two explanations with equal predictive power, USE the simpler.”
The Wikipedia article John Links to seems to agree with me:

…when multiple competing theories have equal predictive powers, the principle recommends selecting those that introduce the fewest assumptions and postulate the fewest hypothetical entities.

Occam’s razor doesn’t say anything about the “Truth” of theories. It just tells you which theory to prefer.

Example: in Physics we often use Newtonian Mechanics – it is simple, and makes very good predictions under many circumstances. However, most Physicists understand Einsteinian Mechanics to be more “True”, and under some circumstances they have much better predictive powers – in those circumstances we should choose to use Einsteinian Mechanics.

Now, I’m really focussing here on the simplicity part. However when I read the quote from Wikipedia they say that I should focus on the fewest assumptions, and fewest hypothetical entities, and doesn’t say anything about simplicity. Now on the Fewest assumptions Einsteinian Mechanics wins – you don’t have to assume velocities not near the speed of light so maybe I’m way off base and Occam’s razor wants me to use them all the time and it is lazyness that makes Newtonian Mechanics so popular with Physicists, and not Occam. Next some other person will say: “No Cameron, you are the crazy one here.”

This entry was posted on Monday, August 21st, 2006 at 10:08 pm and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.