Proving God's (non-)existence

when are we remving this crap occam's razor from our vocabulary?

http://scienceblogs.com/developingintelligence/2007/05/14/why-the-simplest-theory-is-alm/

>>8841262
Always knew it's a fucking retarded idea

occam's razor is just a heuristic. it is not necessarily always correct

>>8841241
According to Occam's Razor that means God does exist.

Because that is all the axioms you ever need. Anything after that can be explained by "God made it so".


The Idea of a god is so eternal and universal in humankind because it is so simple and able to explain anything.

>>8841262
Occam's razor isn't "always go with the simplest theory," it's "out of any number of theories /that fit the data equally well/, go with the simplest one." Outside from this essential misunderstanding, his only argument is "lol, it must be wrong because it's old."

>>8841331
is "simplicity" an objective metric?

>>8841331
but it's wrong. Two theories fit the data equally well, but predict different things. If we just reject the more "complicated" theory right off the bat, we don't even try to test its predictions anymore.

Until someone accidentaly stumbles on new data and someone else digs up old stuff to adapt it and make it relevant again.

Occam's razor is like using gradient descent on a problem you assume is convex but has literaly no reason to be.

>>8841344
>Two theories fit the data equally well, but predict different things. If we just reject the more "complicated" theory right off the bat, we don't even try to test its predictions anymore.
What's the problem with that, unless the accepted theory's predictions prove inaccurate? In that case, it no longer fits the data as well.

>>8841334
Is your mum an objective metric?

>>8841356
I already explained the problem, read the fucking post.

>>8841334
This is a very good point, I think. String theory, for example, is in one sense simple; everything is derived from a single principle (it's the quantum theory of conformally invariant 1D objects in a generally convariant (super)spacetime) and these requirements are satisfied by an essentially unique theory. You can compare the uniqueness of string theory quantum field theories, such as the standard model, QCD, QED, etc. where you can write down more or less any lagrangian with arbitrary constants. It is fair to say string theory is the simplest theory of all.
ST does, however, involve very complicated mathematics that no-one knows exactly how best to formalise -- perturbatively at least we can say something like S-matrix = integrate over fields, sum over topologies of 2D superconformal field theories with insertions for each ingoing and outgoing string -- and makes predictions that don't sit well with what we know about the universe such as SUSY and extra dimensions, so it is fair to say string theory isn't the simplest theory at all.

>>8841403
No, you didn't.