Solomon and Occam

An ACM Queue commentary by Stan Kelly-Bootle, while tongue-in-cheek and entertaining, covers topics that are certainly apropos to truth engineering discussions.

It is hard to follow Bootle, yet one feels that he does understand the issues of quasi-empiricism and hubris.

Perhaps, following Bootle, this little discussion on Now versus other could be code-ized. But, here is a reminder. From Hubris and truth (December 17, 2008):

• Now, back to operational issues and bringing up a checklist (example, medical use). It might go something like this.
• 1) Is this a repeat of some past performance?
• 2) How much is the same in terms of factors, environment, etc.?
• 3) How well do we know the factors dealing with things that have changed?
• 4) Do we have a handle on the cardinality of the unknown unknown set and to what degree?
• 5) ...
• Get the drift? Anything past item 2 would be experimental (thereby bringing in uncertainty).

And, we could add, requiring hypothesis and oops expectation.

Remarks:

06/18/2009 -- A fresh look will be needed.

Modified: 06/18/2009