Is Occam's Razor a Symptom of Being a Cognitive Miser? - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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#15208456
For those who don't know, cognitive miserliness is a regular psychological condition which exists regardless of intellect level. Some try to make the most of their limits, and others try to waste what they have.

Regardless, the pursuit of simple solutions that provide a sufficient degree of explanatory power while shifting burden of proof onto more complex paradigms suggests flat out mental laziness to consider basic assumptions. It's a way to get away with not having to reflect by saying, "You already reflect more than me, so you should have to reflect more than I do." It's a presumption of further expectation based on past behavior, ignoring how situations change over time.
#15208457
I could see occams razor as being used to simply not think through problems at length due to the practicality that many of us do not have such leisure to really know and understand everything out before us.

But it can certainly be used to point out that someone has a convoluted way of stating something which could be said with fewer assumptions.

An individual case would have to be judged as it can’t be assumed that one is convoluted simply because they put more thought to it but neither that rambling represents profound thinking.
#15208458
XDU wrote:
For those who don't know...




Thanks, that was great.

(Since you're new here, that was me being droll, but still thanks, I got a good laugh out of it)

This crap isn't easy, that isn't me being miserly, it's me saying you need to do some serious work to be able to talk about it.
#15208543

Similarly, in science, Occam's razor is used as an abductive heuristic in the development of theoretical models rather than as a rigorous arbiter between candidate models.[5][6]



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor



I'm a fan of complexity theory, so don't-get-me-started -- !



Complexity

For a system to exhibit complexity means that the systems' behaviors cannot be easily inferred from its properties. Any modeling approach that ignores such difficulties or characterizes them as noise will necessarily produce models that are neither accurate nor useful. As yet no fully general theory of complex systems has emerged for addressing these problems, so researchers must solve them in domain-specific contexts. Researchers in complex systems address these problems by viewing the chief task of modeling to be capturing, rather than reducing, the complexity of their respective systems of interest.

While no generally accepted exact definition of complexity exists yet, there are many archetypal examples of complexity. Systems can be complex if, for instance, they have chaotic behavior (behavior that exhibits extreme sensitivity to initial conditions, among other properties), or if they have emergent properties (properties that are not apparent from their components in isolation but which result from the relationships and dependencies they form when placed together in a system), or if they are computationally intractable to model (if they depend on a number of parameters that grows too rapidly with respect to the size of the system).



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_system#Complexity



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XDU wrote:
explanatory power



Here's a diagram for that 'quantity' / quality, from 'low-road' to 'high-road':


philosophical abstractions

Spoiler: show
Image
#15227430
I always considered Occam's Razor as an imperative to check the basics first and foremost and see if a solution can sufficiently be gleaned from that, but, failing that, one is required to look beyond the basics. I don't think it means to automatically satisfy oneself with the most basic principle.

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