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It’s all in your head—naturalness arguments do not require aleatoric uncertainty

  • X-HEP Laboratory

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

Prompted by misconceptions in the recent literature, we review the justifications for naturalness arguments and Occam’s razor found in Bayesian statistics. We discuss the automatic Occam’s razor that emerges in Bayesian formalism, bringing together points of view from diverse fields, including statistics, social sciences, physics and machine learning. In pedagogical calculations, we demonstrate that this automatic razor disfavors unnatural models in which predictions must be fine-tuned to agree with observation.

Original languageEnglish
Article number207
JournalSynthese
Volume207
Issue number5
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - May 2026

Keywords

  • Fine-tuning
  • Naturalness
  • Physics
  • Probability
  • Simplicity

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