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