glen wrote:
Maybe it's just confirmation bias. But parsimony is either obsolete or
a red herring.
I have always felt that at best it was a first order heuristic. My own
experience both with highly structured technical projects and fairly
ad-hoc DIY projects ranging from building things to repairing things to
growing things is that Einstein's version (as quoted by Pieter) of "As
simple as possible but no simpler" is a wonderfully loaded challenge.
Virtually every advanced trick I know of in the aforementioned domains I
learned from someone who had "been there and done that" enough to know
all the places the best "short cut" is a "long cut". Bring everything
back into spec as best you can before "tweaking" the things you know how
to. I'm bad at this, but it really does help to calibrate a tool
before using it (e.g. miter saws work much better if the indicator of
90deg REALLY IS 90deg, easy to check easyish to adjust, worth it). But
to support the idea of parsimony, realizing that rather than getting out
a fancy square, one can simply cut a piece of scrap and flip it over and
see if it aligns with the blade!
In the spirit of (simulated) annealing, it is worthwhile to go explore
some of the *less parsimonious* paths from A to B even if later you come
back and optimize for parsimony in the context of a (more) global
optimum found by allowing yourself discursive searching.
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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