Marcomony in the Physical sciences

In the physical sciences, Marcomony looks a lot more like parsimony. This is because primary utility is what we are tracking back to at all times, and there is little that the physical sciences rely on that is considered "synthesis". Parsimony is strictly the reduction of parameters that give the same quantitative answers to questions.

If one were to do a Marconomic analysis on the Maxwell equations, or Newtonian mechanics, or the General Theory of Relativity, there is very little secondary utility to track back from. One can say that the challenges to Newtonian Mechanics came from new information, such as the inaccuracies in the orbit of Uranus and Mercury. This is not anything to do with Marcomony. However, new information can enable pieces to be placed together with track backs from secondary utility to give strength to alternative disposable razors in cases where a paradigm relies on secondary utility.

Secondary utility can easily creep into models built from the ground up based on reliable physics principles. For example, Climate studies start with the models that reliably predict the weather days in advance. However, the climate models are extrapolated far beyond their capacity to demonstrate primary utility. 

As a general rule, whether it be weather, evolution, economy or any other science that is not strictly physical in nature, simplifications (or parsimony) are required in the transition from a model done from the ground up with physical laws, to a paradigm outside of the realm of physics. Thus, whether it be a climate model, or a comet model, or a model of mutation in evolutionary science, a track back to primary utility is crucial.

In these cases, the confidence these models have gained are from their roots in the physical science. Simplifications are made, and parameters are adjusted to "predict the past" or the term I like to use is "hindcast". Without these models reliably predicting the future, their whole basis is secondary utility. The key to progress is variety of models, different ways of simplifying and therefore different quantity and style of parameters - ie. Alternative paradigms hindcast into historical data rather than adjusting the parameters on a "chosen" paradigm.

Learning robots of the future can only take on the progress of science with this kind of algorithm. Our brains can do this to some extent, and subconsciously, some of us do that, but it is a process that may be able to be automated to be more thorough.

Chain of evidence in historical science

In historical sciences, or even the "dismal" sciences, the idea of repeatable observable evidence does not apply in the same way as the physical sciences. In historical sciences the experiment is done for you and in most cases it is unreasonable to repeat the experiment under controlled conditions. Similarly for the dismal sciences, which is traditionally economics, but can incorporate group psychology, and competition in populations of various species subject to natural selection. An experiment in investment can be 100% effective in generating income with hundreds of repetitions. As soon as the information is disseminated, the learnt reliable rules do not work the same way. Thus the experimental basis and the extremely effective use of parsimony in the physical sciences translates very poorly to the historical sciences (because general rules cannot necessarily be verified) and to the dismal sciences (because general rules are very context sensitive with regards to the information flow within the population or economy)

With the historical sciences, therefore, less weight can be put on "best explanations" using "the least amount of parameters" if there is no indication that they have any more primary utility than alternative explanations. When any, even trivial, new piece of data can come to bear on the paradigm, a differential diagnosis on how alternative paradigms may fare with primary utility is advised with Marcomony.

With the dismal sciences, rules with general application can be reliable rules of thumb, while more mathematically accurate rules must complexify to the point of defining the complete context in which the rule or law will work.

These are in some way contradictory to the supposed benefits of parsimony. There can still be similar benefits to simplification, but they are much more about "rinse and repeat" than the "set and forget" principles that work so well with physics laws such as Relativistic mechanics, and Maxwell's equations to randomly select some fixed laws which should require an extreme bar of disproof to reconsider them.

Something in the historical sciences, such as "selection on random mutations" being sufficient should be easy come easy go. There are a number of naturalistic alternatives, and lots of new data. 

Does the evolutionary synthesis have primary utility?

Marcomony has a very strict view on whether a narrative in toto has primary or secondary utility. As an example of a narrative that has primary utility, one has to just look at the hard sciences. Any of the laws, that we use to predict how things are going to react, and any chain of evidence starting with those laws works. General theory of relativity has primary utility no doubt. 

However, add anything at all that requires parsimony in the chain, or is done with secondary utility in mind failing primary utility, and the whole narrative can no longer claim primary utility status.

Take any religion, for instance. All the major ones are self consistent and other-consistent. The parsimony of a God hypothesis opens up a myriad of opportunities for saving hypotheses for any plausible new data or information. Even if these syntheses/narratives consistently fail to show primary utility, they can lean on their protected status which has continued secondary utility. They can also lean on aspects of the narrative that *do* have primary utility as a counter to criticisms of failing to predict new facts. A catholic may point to the (theoretical) fact that General relativity is part of the narrative of the religion, and therefore can demonstrate primary utility. The overall narrative can not claim anything less than secondary utility if there is a single element in the chain of evidence which cannot demonstrate primary utility.

Things like the Weismann barrier - crucial to the chain of evidence of standard evolutionary synthesis, is not experimentally verifiable (it is not an isolated case). This, unfortunately, places evolutionary synthesis squarely in secondary utility zone, and we should have a multitude of alternate razors for those aspects evolutionary synthesis that don't have primary utility.

Marconomic Analysis of Cometary Science

Once again we look at tracking back to primary utility of the whole narrative of cometary science. The premises of Comet formation is that they accreted from a molecular cloud(s) at around the time of the formation of the solar system. They have also been postulated to have stayed pristine, that is in the cold outreaches of interstellar space until recent times, when they get perturbed closer to the sun and become active. 

This is a very brief outline, but for Marcomonic analysis, we do not need the detail, but the basis for the narrative. Ie. Whether parts of the narrative have 

1) been observed directly, 

2) have primary utility or

3) are based on secondary utility.

Without a chain of evidence, we are relying on the ability of the narrative to predict new facts for primary utility, while the ability to fit new data into the paradigm and to be consistent with the hard sciences is of secondary utility only. This ability of the current cometary paradigm is cited as justification to keep it based on the conservatism of science. That is not do drop an explanation that "works" until a "better" one can be found or proven. This ability to be consistent with secondary utility is just as evident with religious principles as it is with purely scientific ones, so the bar for the incumbent paradigm is set exceedingly low, for it to be retained based on conservatism.

Firstly, we will look at the chain of evidence of pristineness. Accretion disks and molecular clouds are evident in other star systems. In fact, "exocomets" have been found orbiting these young systems, so the "spawning" of comets as mixtures of dust and ices is entirely reasonable if not evident. The issue is the chain of evidence linking comets as we observe them now, to whether their precedent is formation 4.5 Billion years ago, and a cold soak for almost all of the intervening time. 

I would aver that there is no chain of evidence, and the pristine narrative of comets orbiting our solar system (as opposed to Exocomets around other younger systems) is built on a foundation of secondary utility. The advantage of looking at it this way, is that the premise of pristineness predicts certain facts that can only be found by sending probes to comets. If we fail to track back our narratives to primary utility at every new piece of data, we are failing as scientists, and are more like a generic ideologist, rarely ready to admit to weaknesses in the ideology.

The role of parsimony with comets have been a broad brush with a working narrative to commit to. Parsimony should be more flexible than that leaving open a myriad of plausible alternatives that also are simple conceptually, if primary utility may better be served given new information in the future.

The failure of the current paradigm to correctly predict what comets would look like has started with Giotto and continued with every probe flyby and now Rosetta.

With many asteroids, we at least have the impact crater record as a chain of evidence tool to work out surface age, and track back to possible formation. With comets, we have a range of evidence on the surface that is far younger than relevant for impact crater records. That evidence is telling us a lot, and it is almost certainly of recent events in a geological scale. This flips the science of comets on its head. Far from telling us about our early solar system as a time capsule, it is telling us about the here and now of what a dynamical but small solar system object that morphs, cracks, outgasses, changes orbit, changes rotation, damps precession, has a variety of organics on its surface and also outgassed. On top of that it is demonstrating a complex layered structure where layers can slide internally but become solid when exposed to vacuum.

Marconomic analysis of Geogenesis

One of the aspects of science that led me to Marcomony was the historical sciences of origin - ie. Evolution and abiogenesis. To work backwards as to why I favoured panspermia over geogenesis I studied the literature, and to put it in terms of utility, neither could currently demonstrate primary utility, so  parsimony was invoked explicitly, with various justifications based on self-consistency and other consistency. 

The argument can be made that either can be considered the most parsimonious, and in that general situation you get two different camps of "scientists", which I internally refer to as the "NASA block" and the "Wickramasinghe block" because it is how it has worked out. The whole narrative has diverged with these two blocks, and the divergence in how exobiological evidence is interpreted has completely diverged the conclusions from data that is agreed upon as untampered between the two blocks. There is, however, mutual suspicion regarding the massaging of exobiological data to maximise their case. The NASA block is considered the one worthy of the protection from the benefit of doubt, and as a narrative is more "complete" because it explains however imperfectly, a sequence that replaces devine intervention for the origin of life on Earth and/or the universe. Weak panspermia leaves the question of origins uncertain, or a question we should be actively researching, while strong panspermia avers that life had to always be there, with a concept related to entropy that life can only go from the more complex to more simple. Thus, the perceived wisdom that evolutionary steps forward had to come from genes already existent in the universe, delivered to Earth. 

A track back to primary utility would appear to favour (weak) panspermia, because the removal of the burden of proof has been disproportionately done for the NASA block, skewing conclusions in their favour when the evidence mainly leads the other way. Primary utility would note that panspermia predicts new facts more reliably. The detection of O2 gassing from comets is an example, but certainly not an isolated one, where expectations are met with the assumption of active life on comets, while the opposite assumption keeps throwing surprises.

Even the dichotomy between geogenesis and (strong) panspermia is a false one. A scientist once remarked that it was false to think that the only alternative naturalistic explanation of a finely balanced universe is infinitely parallel universes. There are myriad possibilities, and primary utility is going to struggle to track back that far, hence the explicit call to parsimony invoking God (or multiple universes). Other naturalistic options to abiogenesis exist in the same way, but these will be visited in another chapter.

Marcomony as a track back to primary utility of a scientific idea

This chapter looks at the use of parsimony and its alternative Of Marcomony in the context of the marketplace of ideas. In that we need a useful way to value ideas as it is not a very liquid commodity convertible to cash by looking at a price list. Ideas can be converted to currency via copyright and patenting, but more generally, we can look at "scientific" ideas to how useful they are, or their utility.

The natural ‘currency’ of the ‘marketplace of ideas’ is utility. This currency is sufficient in the experimental sciences, for two reasons: firstly, because everyone can agree on where the utility lies. There is no-one who seriously desires less-effective cures for cancer, slower and less reliable telecommunications, poorer fuel economy, space probes that are more likely to miss their targets, crops that give a poorer yield. Secondly, this utility clearly corresponds in almost all cases to a better mapping of the behaviour of the real world. Utility is marked essentially by predicting the effect of our actions on the natural world more accurately; the iteration towards truth is something that is conscientiously desired by all investigators, and their efforts will naturally tend towards it.

In a similar way, this currency is often sufficient in non-experimental sciences whose value is primarily in their utility for making predictions: nobody really wants to waste time looking for oil and gas deposits where they are not, and nobody wants less accurate weather forecasts.

However, the utility of mapping the real world more accurately is not the only utility inherent in an idea. Ideas also have value for their effect on the minds of men: their utility in supporting economic, social, or moral schemes. Here the value of ideas in the ‘marketplace of ideas’ will vary enormously, depending on who is buying and selling. An idea which has great moral value to a Muslim will be of much less value to an atheist, and a model which has great social utility to a libertarian may have no value to a statist. An idea which will be prized by an entrepreneur who can make a great deal of money of it will not have that value to an ivory tower academic.


This secondary utility coexists with the primary utility of an idea in the marketplace of ideas, and where the idea does not readily allow predictions to be made, or makes predictions of little practical value, this secondary utility will be dominant. This secondary utility runs rampant over the actual scientific value in the marketplace of ideas whenever the ideas are anything to do with the environment, anything to do with sex or race, anything where there is big money involved, and – frighteningly – even off in the depths of space with our friendly tweeting comet.

Now, what we need is not an unfettered market of ideas – because idea space is unthinkably vast, and is forever throwing up new monsters; nor a stern admonition that we should disregard secondary utility – because we badly need ideas with social, moral, and economic utility, even if we cannot agree on their market value; but some agreed-upon means to restrain the rampant dominance of secondary utility. There are three ways to do this that I can see, in order of importance:

1.                   Other-consistency. These ideas might not allow you make predictions that can observed, or predictions that can be distinguished from the predictions of other ideas. But they should not directly contradict observations, if at all possible. Ideally, they should be consistent with these observations, and be couched in terms of a plausible mechanism.

2.                   Self-consistency.  You should not be allowed to state, like Walt Whitman: ‘I contradict myself; very well, I contradict myself.’ So far as it possible, the pieces of an idea should be consistent with each other.

3.                   Parsimony. This is the most arbitrary of the three, but the fewer unnecessary frills an idea has, the easier it will be to test, and the easier it will be to argue through. If it adequately meets 1 & 2, it makes sense to adopt it rather than a competing idea which meets 1 & 2 equally well but has additional elements, since those elements are surplus to requirements.

 

These three rules of thumb are regulators of the self-interest that otherwise applies in the lawless market of ideas where secondary utility reigns. They provide some limits, however imprecise and inadequate, to the latitude of the human imagination to propose models that are congenial with their designs.

Thus, parsimony is a fairly arbitrary and subjective way to judge an idea via secondary utility. Self-consistency and other-consistency is a broad enough brush also, as usually, one can think of a myriad of ideas to explain the one phenomenon, that can be other-consistent and self-consistent. Consensus usually narrows this down to one or two alternatives. When there are two alternatives, this is a natural dichotomy which is usually the case where parsimony is explicitly invoked to pick one. The consensus path to narrowing down that far also implicitly uses parsimony, as humans are loath to have too many viable options like balls in the air when juggling.

Marcomony accepts that primary utility is too narrow a target to ignore secondary utility even in "science". However, the permanent setting of a bar (based on secondary utility) for an institution (science) that advertises itself as only dealing with repeatable observational evidence is entirely unsatisfactory. There needs to be a track back from narratives that have relied on parsimony for their secondary utility to look at alternative razors, that also satisfy consistency parameters 1 and 2. The track back is to compare alternative razors, perhaps a multitude, to see if primary utility is better served. A balance in the burden of proof between the incumbent razor and alternative razors is mandatory. No bar of proof is to be placed on the alternative that is not placed on the incumbent.

Example 1: Applying Marcomony to AGW

Looking only at the scientific treatise of anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) The political treatise should be specifically avoided through these steps.

 Step 1) Identify repeatable observations relevant to the paradigm. The observations that are repeatable involve primarily to look at other planets. Venus was found to have a runaway greenhouse effect as a scientifically tight argument that explains the far higher than predicted surface temperature of Venus. Applying that tight science to Earth and Mars gets a reasonable baseline for how the greenhouse effect has been relevant in Earth's and Mars' history, and how it may pan out in the future if greenhouse gases breach certain thresholds. Although this has identified how temperatures can be radically different on these planets, it is still an open question of degree of importance of closeness to the sun (among other factors) in comparison to greenhouse effects. Also, the same physics that is invoked to predict weather is extended into plausible climate predictions.

Step 2) Identify axioms specific to the day to day working of the science as it is practiced. One that I found was an implicit premise that the Anthropogenic "signal" that is the climactic effect attributable to human emissions can be empirically measured independently of transient weather effects and "noise" climactic effects. Another is that this signal is reversible only by the reversal of the causal anthropogenic emissions rather than compensatory deliberate human intervention that attacks the climactic signal directly. A third axiom is of the null hypothesis that neutral or nil human emissions would or could not result in civilisation threatening climate change either from other causes that would be no different with human activity, or that may have been mediated by human activity (eg. If global warming reduced the impact of a naturally occurring ice age)

Marcomony does not dwell on the reasonableness or otherwise of the identified axioms. The primary purpose of identifying them is to judge them on the ability of those axioms to be verified empirically, whether there is an implied shift in the burden of proof in their favour, and how much the whole paradigm relies on these axioms to come to scientific conclusions.

Step 3) Marconomic analysis of the axioms. 1st identified axiom: Whether a piece of data, such as global temperature average or one of the many other thermal energy measures employed can be empirically verified as an anthropogenic signal. Empirical verification can only really happen with predictions being fulfilled in the timescales of decades. This is clearly a work in progress. As far as the burden of proof goes, it has clearly shifted. Other signals, such as solar "signals" have a considerable bar to jump compared to the anthropogenic signal which, within Climate science peer and informal circles, is statutory in the sense that peer reviewed articles do not have to justify stating that there is an anthropogenic signal.

2nd identified axiom. That the anthropogenic signal is only reversible through reversal of emissions. Empirical verification of this is unlikely either way, until the first axiom can be empirically verified, and different strategies employed over decades in succession. If global average temperature is the issue, then this axiom is quite dubious. If more complex climate measures can be empirically verified, then there may or may not be a case. Burden of proof should be balanced, but is in favour of the axiom.

3rd identified axiom similarly is protected from the burden of proof. 

None of this means that Climate science is wrong, and we are not looking at the political or social implications. 

What insights can Marcomony garner that parsimony wouldn't?

Certainly, a focus on how the science can be usefully predictive rather than explanatory of the past. A thought experiment that reverses the burden of proof is worth doing, but there is an important backstop in the original axioms. That is ad extremis, greenhouse gases do eventually effect climate and temperature. This is empirically verified by planets such as Venus. 

Parsimony would dictate that human emissions are the cause of any measurable climate change. Marcomony would prefer climate science that makes useful predictions. Medium term predictions (eg. Over a few years) that are correct and reliable would give us more confidence in the systems calculating predictions in the decades timescales.

Marcomony is not Plenitude

From the encyclopedia of philosophy:

6.2 Principles of Plenitude

Ranged against the principles of parsimony discussed in previous sections is an equally firmly rooted (though less well-known) tradition of what might be termed “principles of explanatory sufficiency.”[24] These principles have their origins in the same medieval controversies that spawned Occam's Razor. Ockham's contemporary, Walter of Chatton, proposed the following counter-principle to Occam's Razor:

[I]f three things are not enough to verify an affirmative proposition about things, a fourth must be added, and so on (quoted in Maurer 1984, p. 464).

A related counter-principle was later defended by Kant:

The variety of entities should not be rashly diminished (Kant 1950, p. 541).
Entium varietates non temere esse minuendas.

Marcomony takes these issues about parsimony more seriously, especially Kant, but I would replace it with a statement like this:

"Truth is as complex as it is - No amount of thought is going to make it simpler. Thought can only manage the complexity in a way which has meaning to us in a functional way"

Therefore, this statement is outright incorrect "The simplest answer is usually the correct one"

The following link demonstrates how easy it is to abuse parsimony.
Abuses of parsimony 

What Marcomony is Not

On re-reading the Wikipedia version of Occams Razor, it is clear that Marcomony is not so much the opposite of parsimony which may state something like
"One must unnecessarily multiply parameters when fewer will do" Marcomony does not imply this.

Nor "the most complex solution is usually the correct one"

Nor"Among competing hypotheses the one with the most assumptions should be chosen"

Nor "Entities must be multiplied beyond necessity "

Marcomony is to be purely viewed as a way to sort and prioritise scientific ideas in the "market for scientific ideas"

When there is a shift in the burden of proof, the barrier of entry for a scientific idea becomes unreasonably high, and all the benefits that accrue from "free trade" in scientific ideas is lost.

As in the real world of free trade, the premise that free trade brings in a multitude of undesirable, unethical or damaging goods and services in competition with incumbent ones is completely unfounded. For every seller of a good or service in a free market, there is a willing buyer. If the buyer is reasonably informed, free trade benefits everyone *As a very vital rule of thumb* Exceptions do not disprove this rule of thumb, so unlike in Physics, where reduction to universal laws that give precise and correct answers to scientific questions, sciences like economics context is everything. Thus, the vital science that is learnt from economics (and Marconomics) is highly context sensitive.

In the same way, a free trade in scientific ideas (by relaxing the tariffs of parsimony) will not result in an infinity of balmy ideas. Scientists have to still buy these ideas, so reducing barriers of entry will actually show balmy ideas for what they are, because they will be more exposed to scrutiny from informed buyers, rather than being peddled to the general naive public. A lot of these new scientific ideas will be context sensitive, and may be useful only until the context changes, but some brand new categories of science will be revealed that will change the world forever.

Question 1 to the reader: Does parsimony imply a shift in the burden of proof?

This question has been an important one in the quest for an axiom that embodies and completes the philosophy of Marconomics.
After a great deal of study of parsimony (and the related Ockhams Razor), I find the answer to question 1 to the reader to be unequivocally *YES*. If everyone could just believe me, this would make my book much shorter, and my attacks on the pointlessness of favouring parsimony much more convincing.

Broadly, however, I find there to be a complete denial that any such shifts in the burden of proof take place in all the facets of science where I have discovered the poisoned fruits of parsimony.

One early point of research that flagged parsimony as a bugbear rather than an asset to science was with the axiom of geogenesis in the study of abiogenesis. It appeared to me that there was considerably more evidence for exogenesis (as in the weak form of panspermia, where the Earth was seeded with single celled organisms from space with as yet unknown providence) than geogenesis.
In digging for the explanation as to why exogenesis had the burden of proof seemingly attached to it, while geogenesis seemingly does not, parsimony is my prime suspect.

Three questions to the reader:
1)Is parsimony explicitly or implicitly used in this case?
2)Has it shifted the burden of proof?
3)Does it matter?

The main defence I have heard is that even in the (unlikely) case that abiogenesis did not occur on Earth, it has to have occurred on a planet similar to the early Earth.

I have discussed this over and over as to how this defence is "science" in any shape or form. Eg. What observations lead to a calculation of probability, and how an unknown process can have a known locale, etc.

Towards the end of my formulation of the alternative of Marcomony (at least as a very precise scientific concept in my own mind), I went back to this early affront of parsimony being the reason panspermia is wholesale rejected, and realised that a whole new science can be born with the simplest of keys being the detection and rejection of parsimony wherever it is found.

Ironically, however, there is no perception of a problem, and radical adversaries (eg. Between panspermia advocates and the mainstream exobiology community) cling to parsimony in one form or another and are equally ignoring its "poisoned fruits" that I so readily calculate based on the removal of the burden of proof. Proponents of a pet theory are generally advocating that their own theory is the one that should have the burden of proof removed (perhaps by arguments that entail it having less parameters or more elegant solutions) rather than pushing for a level "proof-burden" playing field, which Marcomony advocates.

Draft Foreword

"Give me a fruitful error any time, bursting with the seeds of its own corrections. You can keep your sterile truth to yourself." (Wilfredo Pareto)

The basic foundation axiom of the historical sciences – the thing that makes them sciences, rather than history, or philosophy – is uniformitarianism. This is the principle that the same physical laws should apply everywhere, and everywhen. We do experiments with corn starch and clay here on the surface of the Earth, and expect the same rheological correlations we find to apply deep in the interior of distant planets. We do experiments with the nucleic acids of fruit flies, and expect them to shed light on the reproduction of the primordial protoplasmic globule that was the ancestor of all life. We measure the spectra of ions in flames at a thousand degrees, and use them to infer the composition of stars.  We drop balls from towers and deduce laws that allow us to calculate the movement of galaxies.

Why do we accept uniformitarianism? What makes us think the universe is constructed in such a way that every part of it obeys the same laws? That our corner of it is not some freakish backwater dancing to its own drum?  Ultimately, we accept uniformitarianism because it is more fruitful than the alternatives. If the same laws apply here on Earth as in the heavens, we can in principle understand the motions of celestial bodies. If the same laws apply now as applied millions of years, we can in principle understand how life began. It is a purely pragmatic assumption, because it allows to knuckle down and get to work doing something.

And it works. We have pushed this principle back through billions of years and out to the limits of the observable universe, and everywhere we go uniformitarianism seems to work.  Of course, that does not mean that we won’t find something out there tomorrow.  There is no fundamental reason why the universe should necessarily obey the same laws everywhere. There is no reason why these laws should be simple enough that creatures that have evolved within the universe can hope to understand them. Yet, gloriously enough, both those things seem to be true. We haven’t observed any strange astronomical phenomena, or found anything buried under kilometres of limestone, that on careful examination we haven’t been able to explain by the laws we’ve worked out to explain what is happening here, now.

Now, as well as being enormously fruitful in terms of explaining the universe, this purely pragmatic assumption we have made has one other startling property.

It is the simplest assumption we could make.  

This has nothing to do with its effectiveness. But, it means that tangled up with all of our historical sciences – with astronomy, geology, biology – we have the idea, explicitly or implicitly, that the simplest explanation is always best.  In the absence of any other reason to select one explanation over another, we go with the simplest one, as a principle of how we do science.

“Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem” – William of Ockham never said this...

“Everything should be made as simple as possible. But not simpler” – Albert Einstein never said this...

But they did say similar things:

“Frustra fit per plura quod potest fieri per pauciora” (It is futile to do with more things that which can be done with fewer) – William of Ockham

“It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience” – Albert Einstein

These quotes express the principle of parsimony. This principle is a powerful tool for driving progress. I think it is justified on pragmatic grounds, because it is easier to test and use a simple model than a complicated one. I think it is, and should be, the default way of tackling a mass of competing hypotheses.

But...

I also think that a reading of history tells us that the simple model never turns out to be the right one. The parsimonious explanation on incomplete data always turns out to be a gross oversimplification of the explanation that takes all the data into account, or to be entirely incommensurate with that better explanation. Parsimony is a road that leads somewhere, that lets us stretch our legs, but doesn’t in the end take use where we want to go.

It is worth repeating: it is just a coincidence that uniformitarianism is the assumption suggested by parsimony, as well as the one that seems to work.

This happy coincidence, Marco Parigi believes, has infected our thinking, retarding the progress of science.  We need uniformitarianism, and we see its pragmatic success is a vindication of parsimony.  So we think we need parsimony, too. Marco thinks that we have set parsimony up as a false God, and sacrifice perfectly good alternative theories at its altars. Theories that, as more information comes in, will prove to be superior to the ones that we have garlanded with flowers, the darlings of parsimony.  And he is correct.

David Sangster, a senior colleague of mine who worked in the British nuclear program just after the Second World War, was fond of saying: ‘Just because the explanation fits the data, it doesn’t mean the explanation is true.’ This is something every working scientist has engraved on their heart. Parsimony is a tool to select a working hypothesis that can be tested further – a good servant, but a terrible master.

Marco believes he has identified an alternative method of selecting the best working hypothesis from a mass of postulated alternatives – a method he calls ‘Marcomony’. He has tried to explain it to me numerous times, but it has never made any sense to me. This work is his latest attempt. And whether it succeeds or not, it is an attempt that is well worth making. Progress does not come from taking small steps in the direction everyone else is going. It comes from making wild leaps in directions nobody in their right mind would go. Nothing frustrates me more than arguing with people who have crazy ideas simply because everyone else around them has the same crazy ideas;  but arguing with someone who has their own crazy ideas: that is one of my favourite things.

So, I would like to wish Marco the best of luck with this endeavour. Maybe I will understand Marcomony when it is finished: maybe I won’t. Either way, his ringing denunciation of parsimony and visceral hunger for an alternative has an important message for all scientists. (Which is just another way of saying, everyone.)

IMHO.

“I must create a system, or be enslaved to another man’s” – William Blake

A/Prof Christopher Fellows

Marcomony for Dummies

Foreword by Doctor Christopher Fellows

Commentary by Andrew C. Cooper

Axiom X of Marconomic philosophy is incredibly simple and powerful, just rejecting parsimony, but parsimony is so entrenched in the sciences there is no way to change the science as it is done now, but a rebel parsimony free scientific establishment can run with the new paradigm in competition with the scientific establishment.