It's sort of what the Minimum Message Length formulation says.
It's hard to communicate the "essential meaning" of Occam's Razor in simple language, because the only good analogies for it involve things like compression algorithms, quantum physics or topology.
If you know what the word "axiom" really means, and can picture an address of a thing in a set taking up space (e.g. bytes of a URL) as your query gets more specific, then Occam's Razor is a very "obvious" statement about the probability of reification of mathematical objects in our universe given their size. If you don't have that context, someone can talk for an hour and it won't communicate the point.
> It's hard to communicate the "essential meaning" of Occam's Razor in simple language
It's really not. Here's a few that don't make the same mistake.
- Plurality must never be posited without necessity.
- Among competing hypotheses, the one with the fewest assumptions should be selected.
- Entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity.
- Whenever possible, substitute constructions out of known entities for inferences to unknown entities.
- favor hypotheses that make the fewest unwarranted assumptions about the data from which they are derived.
All of these are more correct and communicate the principles better than the "simplest" formulation which is just flat-out wrong without extremely heavy clarification of what "simplest" means (at which point you may as well use one of the above).
I can't find the source of the quote now but a famous physicist once critiqued The Many Worlds interpretation along the lines of "It might be light on assumptions but it's very heavy on universes"
> Quantum many worlds violates most if not all of those everyday language formulations.
This is a common objection to which supporters would say means you're not reviewing the data in enough depth. It's a fair argument tho.
Given Occam is supposed to only be a guideline and not some kind of universal law it wouldn't actually matter if QMW did violate it though (even though that's debatable anyhow).
It was a common statement of a generally justifiable philosophical tool that happened to be commonly used by theologians like Occam (who wasn't that first to use the idea - Aristotle stated something similar).
The intertwining of philosophy and theology makes it related but I'd say your characterization was simplistic and quite incorrect overall.
The actual Occam's Razor is useless unless adapted. How does one count "assumptions" -- if we take Wikipedia's word for what it states -- or "entities" -- if we take the version I first learned?
Most versions that actually work can be lightheartedly equated to a "Principle of Least Foofarah".
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