Feedback is our weekly column of bizarre stories, implausible advertising claims, confusing instructions and more
Occam鈥檚 razor blunted a bit
IDLY reading a random back issue of 快猫短视频 in the bathroom, we came across a letter from David Marjot reminding readers of Hickam鈥檚 dictum (19 October 2013, p 30). We feel this exception to the much better known Occam鈥檚 razor deserves more notice.
holds simply that 鈥渁 patient can have as many diseases as they damn well please鈥�. Take, for example, someone showing up at a clinic with a headache, fever, runny nose and excruciating pain in a big toe. Occam鈥檚 razor 鈥� often given as 鈥渄o not multiply entities unnecessarily鈥� 鈥� suggests a diagnosis of improbablitis, a single entity that covers all the symptoms but is spread only by river worms in the land of Nonexistentia.
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On the other hand, the unfortunate could have flu on top of gout.
Reader Paul Smith suggests 鈥渟elling homeopathic preparations of rhino horn and sending all profits to rhino conservation鈥�. Nice subversion of fruitloopery. First, a discussion of ethics鈥�
Conspiracy counterclaims
OCCAM鈥橲 razor is notable these days for people using and abusing it to justify their non-standard mentation 鈥� particularly about conspiracy theories. It can also be applied to debunking these: perhaps introducing a remote-controlled holographic missile-equipped passenger plane does not help to understand events at the Pentagon in Washington DC on 11 September 2001?
Its modifier, Hickam鈥檚 dictum, described above, has similar utility. A tragedy may have more than one contributing cause: perhaps the Pont de l鈥橝lma road tunnel in Paris, France, was crowded, and the driver of the car bearing Diana Windsor not sober?
Indeed, it remains to be seen which may need to be wielded in response to the flood of paranoid postings we sadly predict will follow our report on new laser weapons that induce temporary blindness (鈥�Laser attack: The invisible weapon that can blind you鈥�).
Introducing Walter Chatton
THERE is little new under the sun. While surveying the rather sparse references to Hickam鈥檚 dictum, we encountered , a 14th-century contemporary of William of Occam (or Ockham) who argued philosophy with him. So far, we understand that Chatton proposed a set of principles for when it makes sense to introduce a 鈥渘ew entity鈥� to your theory, contrary to Occam鈥檚 razor. We hope, one day, to emerge from our present pit of late-medieval philosophical discourse bearing a gem of crystalline clarity.
Journal jinx jamboree
DETECTING fake journals is another area in which the competing principles of Occam and Hickam may be in tension, constructively. It鈥檚 increasingly difficult to tell the 鈥渉opeful monsters鈥� 鈥� that is, publications hoping to have evolved new business models that make everything in the academic publishing garden rosy 鈥� from the scams.
Joan Curzio seeks our help evaluating 鈥� and we鈥檙e stumped. The soliciting letter is arguably in perfectly good Indian English. The lack of named editors-in-chief for the medical journals due to launch on 10 April may be a website flaw. The papers referencing Ayurvedic principles are beyond us.
How to rate these blogs?
MEANWHILE an organisation called sends Feedback an invitation to 鈥淩evolutionize your Research with the world鈥檚 only repository of published scholarly blog content鈥�. Hypothesis: the content may not be fully state-of-the-art. Experiment: list the contributions relating to climate change. Result: a whole series of blog postings by Judith Curry, whose perspective could be described as non-standard, such as 鈥淐limate psychology鈥檚 consensus bias鈥�. Need to introduce new entities to our hypothesis: none, yet.
Simpsons鈥� scholarly scam
CLEARER cases are those of Computational Intelligence and Electronic Systems and the Aperito Journal of NanoScience Technology. The headline of a about the two, sent by Philip Clapham, tells most of the story: 鈥淲hen Maggie Simpson can get a paper into a science journal, you know you鈥檝e got trouble.鈥�
Alex Smolyanitsky, a Colorado-based materials scientist, followed up Feedback鈥檚 intermittent running story (most recently 28 June 2014) on the , which generates utter nonsense vaguely in the form of a computer science paper. He submitted a pseudopaper to both journals, pseudonymously.
The unlikely is inevitable
PONDERING Hickam鈥檚 dictum, Feedback wonders about a roughly equivalent principle in risk analysis. It has long seemed to us that anyone who suspects the probability of a set of independent failures occurring together to be vanishingly small should urgently make plans to cope with them all happening at once.
Nuclear accidents provide examples 鈥� but not, as far as we can tell, a name. Can you help?
Precise pi day approaches
FINALLY, it is time to excavate from our piling system a response to our query about whether readers were celebrating Pi Approximation Day on the (UK format) date 22/7 (12 July 2014). 鈥淚 imagine,鈥� Andrew Green writes, 鈥渢hat there is great excitement in the Pi community about celebrating at 9:26 and 54 seconds on the [US format] date 3/14/15, although the celebrations may be somewhat transitory鈥�.
Of course 3/14/15 9:26:54 is the closest we鈥檒l get to the precise value of the constant that relates the circumference of a circle to its diameter for, ooh, ages. So: how will you toast pi next week?