|
Haven't heard of Hickam's dictum before, thanks! I see how it makes sense, given it comes from medicine - the very field dedicated to literally the single most complex system we know of: the human body. But I don't see it as an opposite to Occam's razor - rather, a missing lower bound. That is, I see Hickam's dictum as a reminder that some hypotheses may be too simple. My guess at how one would formalize this is, when you're comparing hypotheses explaining something in a given domain (such as "behavior of things being thrown", or "health of a human body"), there is a level of complexity inherent to the domain. A hypothesis that's so simple as to fall below that level is too simple - it doesn't have enough bits to express what's happening within the domain. The further below the complexity threshold it is, the more likely it is to be falsified by new evidence. In contrast, hypotheses above the domain complexity level are all capable of explaining the domain fully; however, the more complex a hypothesis, the more likely it is to be at least partially wrong. This gives us the following takes: - Occam's razor: for hypotheses above the domain complexity threshold, the least complex one is most likely to be true. - Hickam's dictum: your hypothesis is way below the domain complexity threshold - which you didn't notice, because you don't appreciate how complex the domain is in the first place. Reconciliation: - The closer a hypothesis is to the domain complexity level, the more likely it is to correctly explain new evidence. The best hypothesis matches the complexity of the domain. Above it, hypotheses gain superfluous parts, which are either redundant (unlikely), or wrong (very likely). Below it, hypotheses are always wrong - they're too simple to account for all possible predictions, so new evidence will eventually falsify them. The tricky part is - even though we both postulate hypotheses and define their domain, we tend to hand-wave the latter a lot, so in some cases (like medicine) we may not realize that our hypotheses are too simple. |