Occam's razor in science: all-time practice or modern fashion?

[Rive]

Here is an Insights article I wrote on using Bayesian inference

Seen that, but you know... 'inside science' it's nice but kind of redundant, while 'outside science' you'll lose the public at 'Baye...', because it continues with equations and not with football

I think to mitigate Occam's failure for the public you'll need something what can go with a beer or two too

 

[Dale]

'inside science' it's nice but kind of redundant

Well, I don't think it is redundant since many scientists are not familiar with Bayesian methods.

 

[apostolosdt]

I've read the first two references in Nature's editorial, as cited in Lord Jestocost's post, a few posts above, and I'd like to share some thoughts of mine about their claims.

In Hoffmann et al. review article, the authors discuss Occam's Razor, both historically and through comparisons with other "simplifying" principles, within the framework of reaction mechanisms in chemistry. In the last sections, they also mention its status in Bayesian analysis. As I understand from the numerous statistics-inclined posts in this thread, those sections will be most interesting. The article itself is rather long, twenty-one pages plus notes & references, but it's worth reading. The concluding passage is the authors' remark that Occam's Razor is more like "an instruction in an operating manual," rather than "a world view."

The second reference in Nature, however, is more intriguing. It's called "Inverse Occam's razor," by I. Mazin. It's not a research paper, call it a short review article. It talks about a current tendency among journal editors to prefer complicated papers rather than simpler ones---hence the name "inverse." The reasons appear to be less scientific and more about the impact such publications will make.

Philosophy is one discipline and science is another, and how much they overlap is, in my opinion, not an objective issue. I prefer to see them as `orthogonal' to each other and, personally, I'm reluctant to entrust the interpretation of a 21th-century set of experimental data to a 14th-century "scholastic Philosopher."

But let me, for the sake of argument, assume for a moment the validity of Occam's Razor. The `simpler approach' it suggests is how we, people, tend to model our data in the hope of tracing some pattern in them. That should never be taken as some indication that Nature prefers to be simpler as well! Natural phenomena can and, most probably, are too complicated. Practicing scientists experience that during all their daily work.

I particularly enjoyed what Feynman used to lecture about `simplicity' in Nature; the video is from his famous "Go somewhere else!" statement:

 

[Dale]

That should never be taken as some indication that Nature prefers to be simpler as well!

This is a good point. Sometimes you hear Occham’s razor mis-stated as “all other things equal the simplest explanation is usually right”. The simplest explanation is usually the best, even if it is not right. And in science we generally assume that none of our explanations are “right”, so “best” is all we can do.