[JulianMorrison]

"Fact" doesn't mean p==1 (an unreachable goal) it means p approximates 1, less some insignificant minuscule slice of the pie within which live all the mad implausibilities you might think up - but which Occam's razor forbids.

[bOR_]

Occam's razor is frequently misused. It is not a law, and using it to forbid something that cannot easily be explained is counterproductive. Occams Razor works nicely when deciding whether to use a linear or a nonlinear function to describe some mathematical relationship, but beyond mathematics, what of two things is 'simpler' can be highly subjective.

P.S. I think the whole topic of this thread is sort of not within Hackers' News interest (just peeked at the guidelines). Calling it quits for now.

[JulianMorrison]

Occam's Razor has a non-mathematical history, but it parallels the recently discovered mathematics behind "Inductive inference" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inductive_inference) and the AIXI model of a provably optimal learning system.