Why is simpler better?

[Newest Reality]

Ockham’s Razor says that simplicity is a scientific virtue, but justifying this philosophically is strangely elusive

Elliot Sober is the Hans Reichenbach Professor and William F Vilas Research Professor in the department of philosophy at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. His latest book is Ockham’s Razors: A User’s Manual (2015).
<snip>

Newton doesn’t do much to justify these rules, but in an unpublished commentary on the book of Revelations, he says more. Here is one of his ‘Rules for methodising/construing the Apocalypse’:

To choose those constructions which without straining reduce things to the greatest simplicity. The reason of this is… [that] truth is ever to be found in simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things. It is the perfection of God’s works that they are all done with the greatest simplicity. He is the God of order and not of confusion. And therefore as they that would understand the frame of the world must endeavour to reduce their knowledge to all possible simplicity, so it must be in seeking to understand these visions…

<snip>

Gaudí and Mies remind us that there is no disputing matters of taste when it comes to assessing the value of simplicity and complexity in works of art. Einstein and Newton say that science is different – simplicity, in science, is not a matter of taste. Reichenbach and Akaike provided some reasons for why this is so. The upshot is that there are three parsimony paradigms that explain how the simplicity of a theory can be relevant to saying what the world is like:

Paradigm 1: sometimes simpler theories have higher probabilities.

Paradigm 2: sometimes simpler theories are better supported by the observations.

Paradigm 3: sometimes the simplicity of a model is relevant to estimating its predictive accuracy.

These three paradigms have something important in common. Whether a given problem fits into any of them depends on empirical assumptions about the problem. Those assumptions might be true of some problems, but false of others. Although parsimony is demonstrably relevant to forming judgments about what the world is like, there is in the end no unconditional and presuppositionless justification for Ockham’s Razor.

https://aeon.co/essays/are-scientific-theories-really-better-when-they-are-simpler

[mopinko]

1. considering the utter complexity of nature/life, i have always found it questionable.

it is at odds w everything we know about the durability of diverse systems.

[trotsky]

2. It would help to understand Occam's Razor as written, not the common rephrasing of it.

"Entities should not be multiplied without necessity."

That's not the same as saying "the simplest explanation is likely the most accurate." Instead it means if adding something to an explanation doesn't help explain it any better, then don't. It can help keep us from injecting our own personal preferences into scientific theories.

Q: How did the universe begin?

A1: The universe began from an enormous explosion of energy and matter called the Big Bang.

A2: The universe began from an enormous explosion of energy and matter called the Big Bang, which God caused to happen.

[Newest Reality]

3. I also find...

Bertrand Russel's later version useful:

"Whenever possible, substitute constructions out of known entities for inferences to unknown entities."

As for the semiotics of it, Wittgenstein interpreted it this way and I find it elegant:

"If a sign is not necessary then it is meaningless. That is the meaning of Occam's Razor."

(If everything in the symbolism works as though a sign had meaning, then it has meaning.)

The idea of parsimony that we know use to decide between theories was not the original intent of Occam's razor, (a principle that dates back to Aristotle and, "Nature operates in the shortest way possible." ) and it is utilized often by layman often in this culture as the familiar cliche, "the simplest explanation is usually the correct one." when it might be more appropriate to refer to deductive reasoning in some cases rather than refer to the Razor in some contexts.

Ironically, the Razor is not as simplistic as a mere trope might imply and its usage can get out of hand when taken to an extreme. It's use, value and significance are context dependent in that case.