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“This is probably among the 100% of issues that could be improved with flowcharts” – what does this mean? I mean, what does this add to “This is probably an issue that could be improved with a flowchart”? Is it saying that any issue could be improved with a flowchart?

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By the same token, a program describing a whole bunch of people isn’t really much simpler than a program which instantiates one additional person with all the same basic personality subroutines plus an ability to cast Lightning Bolt. I don’t really see much point in going into the finer details of holes in Norse mythology, given that our sources aren’t even that close to the originals.

(Parting thought: what of Divine Simplicity? Does Occam compel us to accept this? I feel like this is another variant of the ontological argument.)

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I think both would fail the test given, since both involve infinite computer programs…

To be fair, you can generate arbitrarily varied structure with a finite set of generation rules, and Kolmogorov rules state that you go by the complexity of the generating program rather than of the output. You need an infinity somewhere to get infinitely varied output, but that can be in parameters like run time or memory, not necessarily the instruction set.

By my lights this applies to gods as well as to physics, though, with the caveat that we know a lot about physics and gods tend to be seen as famously ineffable.

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“Read the sequences” can be valid when there’s a link to a specific page, instead of vague handwaving at several novels’ worth of mostly unrelated material. In that vein, your comment was indeed helpful, and I both found the link interesting and deserved it for being snide, but… (you knew there had to be a “but”)

LessWrongers tend to treat The Sequences as scripture; I don’t think they realize the extent to which people can disagree with them. I find the dissenting comments there have the better of it; Vikings weren’t wrong about lightning because Thor is complex, they were just wrong because it happened not to work that way. Defining Occam’s Razor in terms of Turning machines not only makes the Razor inaccessibly to Occam and most of the scientific patriarchs, it kills it as a heuristic. Occam’s Razor, is, after all, only a rough rule of thumb which has been wrong many times, and once you remove the ability to compute a heuristic quickly, it’s no longer even useful as a rule of thumb. (Does this mean that anything non-computable also fails Occam?)

The rule of thumb thing matters a lot, especially since I usually see it deployed in the manner of the OP; an atheist wants to show there is no God, and it all ends up hinging on the Razor. I have seen atheists passionately argue that “infinite universes in infinite combinations” are less complex than “infinite God,” therefore No God. Which of these is really simpler seems to boil down to very motivated reasoning, and I think both would fail the test given, since both involve infinite computer programs (assuming God is computable at all). And in the end, it doesn’t even matter; Occam’s Razor is still just a quicker way of guessing a little better, not solid evidence.

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The one that is most formally written up does appear to be on arxiv.

What paper?

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