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comment by Dweomite · 2023-10-19T20:22:57.255Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

When reading this essay, I kept having the feeling that you had just said something using specialized jargon that you were about to explain, except every explanation devolved into yet-another historical reference that required its own explanation, and none of the explanations ever tied back to the original thing.

I am left with the impression that you think there is some important difference between "don't add extra elements" and "remove elements if you can", and that you think Ockham said the second thing.  I don't know what you think the difference is, or why you think it's important, or why you think Ockham said the second thing (the quotes you gave sound more like the first thing to me, insofar as I can distinguish between them at all).  And I have a sneaking suspicion that at least one of those two things means something very different to you than a plain reading would suggest to me.

Also I am left with the impression that you care a lot about what various historical figures originally meant and not very much about the actual practice of epistemology, since you seem to argue only about historical context and not about why some principle would be good or bad to actually use.

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comment by [deleted] · 2023-10-19T21:35:06.427Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

As per the title, it was more an alignment with what I believe Ockham wanted to say, and it is difficult to say something that Ockham wanted to communicate from my point of view without the historical context. But I admit that my message was probably badly formatted. 
To begin with, I wanted to explain what I think Ockham is not and give a very narrow overview of 'who said what'. Secondly, I extrapolated Ockham's words from the original text to create a link between the message distorted by 3 centuries of exegesis and what he had actually said, and then give it an inherited context and subsequently project it into contemporaneity with 'less is more' heuristics, in between I wanted to insert something like 'epilogism' into this microscopic monograph to give a little perspective on discernment and anti-historicism in decision theory, with the application of the razor.

Secondly, I think the distinction between 'don't add entities' and 'try to eliminate entities' in decision-making is crucial. Although we are discussing minute details, simplification in decision-making is an improvement, provided we assume well-founded priors. For further examination, see any of Gigerenzer's papers, which I find brilliant.

I did not want to distinguish between 'good' and 'bad' principles. Only to distinguish what we can take as Ockham's Razor from what seems to be, but is not. And I would like to add that, perhaps, the fact that English is not my mother tongue penalises me a little on expressiveness and style of language, so if there are mistakes and confusion, I take responsibility and apologise now.

I also wanted to thank you for the constructive comment. I will try to do better next time.