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.