Thread:User talk:Tmtoulouse/Bump: You know that obnoxious thing people do on the internet when they've said something and they feel they haven't been paid enough attention? I'm doing that./reply (23)

Define model, element in a model. Can you give a precise definition to these terms? I have some idea what you are talking about, but it would be clearer if you could define these terms more precisely.

Consider the following claim: "The universe will cease to exist on Friday 8th July 2011". How many "elements" are in that "model"? Considering the opposite claim: "The universe will continue to exist after Friday 8th July 2011". How many elements in the model of that claim? Is one of these statements more parsimonious than the other, or are they equal in complexity?

The relative time between now and that prediction is not a factor in the models complexity. So, its not the complexity of the universe that would exist were the model true, or the complexity of the observations we would expect to have were the model true, but the complexity of the model itself? This goes back to part of my point - we have multiple competing formulations of the principle of parsimony. Why choose to follow your formulation rather than some other one?

more complex models are better than simplier models when the residuals of the complex model are some significant value less than the simpler model. - comparing my two claims, i.e. the universe will suddenly end on this Friday, v.s. it will continue to exist after that date, how do their residuals differ?