Bayes’ rule exercise: is a simple or a complicated answer to a complicated problem more likely to be correct?

Depends on the conditional probabilities: if simple questions are more likely to have simple answers and complex questions complicated, then a complicated answer is more likely to be correct for a complicated problem.

It seems reasonable that the complexity of the answer is correlated with the difficulty of the problem. But this is an empirical question.

If difficult problems are likely to have complex answers, then this is an argument against slogans and ideologies. These seek to give a catchy one-liner as the answer to many problems in society. No need to think – ideology has the solution. Depending on your political leaning, poverty may be due to laziness or exploitation. The foreign policy “solution” is bombing for some, eternal appeasement for others.

The probabilistic preference for complex answers in complicated situations seems to contradict Occam’s razor (among answers equally good at explaining the facts, the simplest answer should be chosen). There is no actual conflict with the above Bayesian exercise. There, the expectation of a complex answer applies to complicated questions, while a symmetric anticipation of a simple answer holds for simple problems. The answers compared are not equally good, because one fits the structure of the question better than the other.