[Fis] Occam's razor

[Karl Javorszky]

Occam’s Razor and Venture Capital



Arturo’s homepage is very instructive. The figure of a medieval scholar and
innovator springs to mind. Pedro has, in our long history, repeatedly
referred to the school of Salamanca as the interdisciplinary centre of
European intellectuality. We live in historic times (not only in matters of
information theory).



To have a self-employed creative mind, interdisciplinary thinker, in our
midst, is one more of the encouraging turns this august society has taken
over the years. As a self-employed clinical psychologist on the very edge
of retiring, in Vienna, this person may put forward an idea that needs the
competence of the membership of FIS.



Let us return to Occam’s razor. The idea is that between two possible
explanations that one is to be preferred, which is simpler. Wiki: "A
hypothesis with fewer adjustable parameters will automatically have an
enhanced posterior probability, due to the fact that the predictions it
makes are sharp."[33]
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam%27s_razor#cite_note-Jefferys-33>

Jefferys, William H.; Berger, James O. (1991). "Ockham's Razor and Bayesian
Statistics (preprint available as "Sharpening Occam's Razor on a Bayesian
Strop")" <http://quasar.as.utexas.edu/papers/ockham.pdf> (PDF). American
Scientist <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Scientist>. *80*: 64–72



You are invited to cooperate in the project of building mankind’s first
numeric Occam machine. This is a huge database, conceptually comparable to
all trigonometric values, or – in a different approach – to the Online
Encyclopaedia of Integer Sequences. It is huge task for one individual, but
a task force of 1-2 programmers, 1-2 mathematicians and 1 user interface
manager can have a very nice working system, not only for personal use, but
accessible and living, in a few days, maybe weeks. The sense of such a
general Table of Movements is to enable users to build their successive
tables that answer their individual questions. The rhetorical task is not
enviable, as one tries to sell the idea of building a tool that helps users
to look up answers to their questions, if – as it is at the present moment
unquestionably so – the prospective users do not yet know that they need
these data to verify or falsify their questions.



At this point, FIS comes in. The rhetoric task does have a fighting chance
of getting attention, because the composition of the audience is wide,
faceted enough; by coming from so many different backgrounds we have a
perspective of global approach to information theory. The invention that
transforms theory into a technological procedure does have a marketable
value. Unfortunately, although information shows itself, it is very
elusive, so we can’t present a prototype like Diesel, not even seeds like
Mendel. The principle is here also of novelty value and can be expressed
towards politicians and businessmen in simple words, vale Occam, like e.g.:

“We had difficulties understanding information because we have had a blind
spot in our education. We were so much fascinated by the ideas of equality,
similarity, uniformity and replaceability that we have between the lines
discouraged research into the positions of the logical arguments in a
logical sentence. Some Spanish professor has assembled an informal
interdisciplinary community of nerds, over 20 years ago. They have now come
up with an idea that seems to have some merit. The idea is to picture
logical conflicts within a logical system which is of course traditionally
a no-no. They figured out that we in fact exist only always a third of the
time in each of three planes (front, across, up) in a logically sound
fashion. By that trick, there is an accounting continuity from the sequence
to the more-dimensional object. It fits ideally well with the numbers. They
figured this out by sorting and ordering simple expressions like a+b=c, and
watching the patterns of displacements while being reordered from an order
into a different one. Pure Occam, a solid explanation built on sorting
natural numbers between 1 and 16.”



Such an expose could make some interesting response. Let me hope that
Occam’s followers find their common interest in presenting a development by
FIS of a computer-ready project that advances science. Such a project is a
Christmas present for any decision maker, because he can understand that
discovering the importance of a small detail and using the information
contained in the sequences can be no wrong.



Let me respectfully ask the dear FIS if anyone is about to begin
contemplating whether to show some interest in hosting the first
interactive version of a tautomat.



Thank you for your attention.

Karl
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