If you clear your mind of justification, of argument, then it seems obvious why Occam’s Razor works in practice: we live in a simple world, a low-entropy universe in which there are short explanations to be found. “But,” you cry, “why is the universe itself orderly?” This I do not know, but it is what I see as the next mystery to be explained. This is not the same question as “How do I argue Occam’s Razor to a hypothetical debater who has not already accepted it?”
The philosophers have been busy trying to answer the question which Eliezer has taken pains to distinguish from another question. A lot of the philosophical material on the question of Occam’s razor either tries to justify it in a non-question-begging fashion, or else argues that it cannot be so justified. Either way, the focus is on the justification. But there is something else that can be focused on: the question of whether Occam’s razor is in fact true, or valid. Of course, in itself it is a method rather than a claim, but we can roughly translate it into the claim that among the possible hypotheses to explain a phenomenon, the true hypothesis tends to be the simplest. This can be asserted as a conjecture about the world we live in. Occam’s Razor can be thought of as a general hypothesis about the world, which may or may not be true. And if it is true, then it is true even though we have been unable to justify our acceptance of it in a non-question-begging way. The truth does not actually depend on the possibility of our one day finding a non-circular justification for it.
I think this contains one of the main points:
The philosophers have been busy trying to answer the question which Eliezer has taken pains to distinguish from another question. A lot of the philosophical material on the question of Occam’s razor either tries to justify it in a non-question-begging fashion, or else argues that it cannot be so justified. Either way, the focus is on the justification. But there is something else that can be focused on: the question of whether Occam’s razor is in fact true, or valid. Of course, in itself it is a method rather than a claim, but we can roughly translate it into the claim that among the possible hypotheses to explain a phenomenon, the true hypothesis tends to be the simplest. This can be asserted as a conjecture about the world we live in. Occam’s Razor can be thought of as a general hypothesis about the world, which may or may not be true. And if it is true, then it is true even though we have been unable to justify our acceptance of it in a non-question-begging way. The truth does not actually depend on the possibility of our one day finding a non-circular justification for it.