Category: #Wicked
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Is Ockham’s razor losing its edge?
Is Ockham’s razor losing its edge? New perspectives on the principle of model parsimony The preference for simple explanations, known as the parsimony principle, has long guided the development of scientific theories, hypotheses, and models. Yet recent years have seen a number of successes in employing highly complex models for scientific inquiry (e.g., for 3D…
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Functional Trade-offs in Cognition
“Basic Functional Trade-offs in Cognition: An Integrative Framework” by Marco Del Giudice and Bernard J. Crespi, 2018. Trade-offs between advantageous but conflicting properties (e.g., speed vs. accuracy) are ubiquitous in cognition, but the relevant literature is conceptually fragmented, scattered across disciplines, and has not been organized in a coherent framework. This paper takes an initial step toward a general…
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nature was much more inventive
Space scientist Edward Stone served as project scientist for NASA’s Voyager missions for 50 years, as well as playing a major role in many other missions, acting as director of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and running his own lab at Caltech. Stone has died, aged 88. Here are some remarkable quotes from “Celebrating Voyager’s 40…
