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 (22)

The principle of parsimony doesn't care the least about the amount of time in which an observation takes place. It cares about the number of elements in a model.

The predicted end of the universe or the existence of the end is not a model itself but rather a prediction of a model. To compare two models in terms of parsimony (one predicting the end next thursday, one predicting the end in 15 billion years) we need to see the elements that make up those models that make that prediction. The prediction itself whether next thursday or 15 billion years is a single prediction, a single point of data. The relative time between now and that prediction is not a factor in the models complexity.

Also keep in mind parsimony includes the "all things being equal" more complex models are better than simplier models when the residuals of the complex model are some significant value less than the simpler model.

I don't really see much to reply to here. A lot of it has nothing to do with what we are talking about, and the rest seems to be a misstatement of how parsimony as applied to model building is actually used.