Блог: Ockham's Razor, or Mag vs PC

let's go:)

奥卡姆剃刀（Occam's Razor, Ockham's Razor），又称“奥坎的剃刀”，是由14世纪逻辑学家、圣方济各会修士奥卡姆的威廉（William of Occam，约1285年至1349年）提出。奥卡姆（Ockham）位于英格兰的萨里郡。他在《箴言书注》2卷15题说“切勿浪费较多东西，去做‘用较少的东西，同样可以做好的事情’。”

даже и сказать-то нечего)

"ничего не говори… сердце жжот огонь любви… " © Рок-Острова

By the beef-witted liberoids who have lost any hope to win against me in a fair way and now employ methods more familiar to them? Was such a “valuable” source of advice actually worth mentioning?

Kindly accept my condolences for your lacking sense of humor, please. My message in Russian was but a meme:
http://lurkmore.to/Who_are_you_to_fucking_lecture_me%3F

Please cite any instance of such a “proof” as I have failed to notice any so far.

You are free to believe in whatever you prefer to, but I suspect that this description fits much better to your way of disputing. And this is not the only example when you’re attempting to ascribe your own faults to the others (including, but not limited, to me).

You would be certainly more understandable, if specified.

Blah-blah-blah… Could you be more specific, please?

Why don’t you try to amuse us with your own translation endeavour – both precise and idiomatic? I have offered this to you three months ago, but you seem to prefer baseless generalisations to clear evidence, don’t you?
I have also suggested that you corroborate your bold hypothesis that

I didn’t know that Latin was the lingua franca for the medieval clergy? Forget it!

It only appear unequivocal to you because you are innocent of logic. Otherwise you would care about the degree of obligation the verb implies – whether in English, Latin, Russian or whatever language – much less than about the explicit statement I emboldened and italicised to make you finally see the obvious:

This “beyond necessity” introduces the conditionality I was talking about all the time and is a conclusive proof that Ockham’s Razor does NOT have absolute validity as a logical rule.

Your interpretation deviates from the original meaning incomparably more than mine, I’m afraid.

It is rather a i>rule of thumb frequently misinterpreted by those who have not much idea of logic and therefore, consider “Entities are not to be multiplied” to be an absolute rule without exceptions even though this rule is followed by an unambiguous statement of its conditionality: Entities are not to be multiplied beyond necessity (i.e., not always).

… being able nevertheless to swiftly produce gargantuan texts like this one, but happily forgetting about the articles (e.g., “I’m in a hurry -personally I knew the right way to say this since I was a schoolboy)?
Tell it to the horse marines! ;-)

You don’t, but I do. And all competent people do as well.
A non-native speaker may be good for some tasks and be even superior to native speakers in some aspects (e.g., in innovative translation ideas), but he can never be flawless (otherwise, he would automatically become a (bilingual) native speaker, whatever his ethnic origin). Specifically, Slav native speakers (to which you and me belong to) are known to be (with possible rare exceptions) unable to perfectly learn the usage of articles (exactly as most non-Slavs can never perfectly master the usage of aspects in Russian). You are a shining example of this inability.
Sooner or later, an error occurs. And your missing indefinite article was just another proof of this fact I was aware of long ago. And this had actually been the only mistake of yours that I finally counted as a certain mistake (as any English teacher would have done in my place).

However, since you foolishly pretend to be perfect in English, more instances of your blunders are to follow this time.

That’s perfectly true. I can remember Governor Skliarov’s speechway. His Russian was awful as that of Yeltsin or Chernomyrdin was, to mention just a few personalities we both have an idea of. But note that their mistakes, however awkward, were only typical for native speakers.
Foreigners make different mistakes. And even if I didn’t know who Skliarov was, I would have been able to easily identify him as a Russian native speaker – precisely as any Englishman in a London pub will easily tell you from a native speaker of English.

So you again miss the point, thus facilitating for me the demonstration of who of us two is actually

to use your own language.

How’s that? Because it were even theoretically wrong to assume that you can make mistakes? Or because logic is not exactly your strength as we have already found out? ;-)

First, the right way to say it is “It suggests”.
Second, did you conclude this from my remark that your mistake, whether a typo or not, sounds fairly funny in the context?! Congratulations! Your logical disability seems to be unflawed.

But “causal people” hardly belongs to them, or does it?

I know what this means. But the talk was about the phrase you coined, “causal people”, and about its anecdotic relevance to the question, whether Ockham’s Razor comprises conditionality.
You are undeniably lacking not only logical abilities, but also the sense of humor. I have already indicated both facts above though.

Only in your dreams, I’m afraid! ;-)

Here we, again, have an illustration of one of your beloved methods of discussion: to ascribe the opponent smth. he neither said nor thought and then successfully criticise him for this. A trick typical for liberoids in general.
I have most certainly never written “you cheking” because – in contrast to you – I perfectly know that the right spelling is “checking”, not “cheking”.
As for 'you checking' vs. ' your checking', you may want to attend a crash course in English grammar as the grammatical structure “you checking/doing smth.” belongs to the most basic in English. And it is certainly widely used. Like here:
http://www.lexingtonkyrealestate.org/Brand_New_Versus_Resale.asp
or here:
http://www.algebra.com/algebra/homework/Inequalities/Inequalities.faq.question.52509.html
or here:
http://readingbodylanguagenow.com/reading-body-language-the-non-verbal-language-of-women-part-2/
And if you google for the “I don’t want you doing smth.” phrase – which is fully identical in terms of grammar, you’ll find approximately 224 million (!) hits.
http://www.google.ru/search?hl=ru&newwindow=1&biw=1920&bih=891&q=%22want+you+doing%22&oq=%22want+you+doing%22&aq=f&aqi=g-jL2&aql=&gs_sm=3&gs_upl=54033l58782l0l59969l2l2l0l0l0l0l100l178l1.1l2l0&gs_l=serp.3..0i18i19l2.54033l58782l0l59969l2l2l0l0l0l0l100l178l1j1l2l0
Still not convinced? But what is actually your own proof that the expression is bad English? Nothing but your self-conceit persuading you that you know English better than native speakers? And this with your poor level of literacy in both English and Russian? ;-)

Once more, I strongly advise you to attend an English course provided you don’t want to remain the laughingstock of the whole neighbourhood forever. Here is a quotation known by heart by probably any English native speaker:

Will you insist that Mr. Milne, the author of Winnie-the-Pooh (known in Russia as Винни-Пух), wrote “clumsy English”? (“sounds clumsy” sounds better than “sounds clumsily”, by the way, Mr. I-Know-It-All).
I would rather suggest that you are a stupid loudmouth who hoped I would have not been able to counter your allegations.

This is another piece of evidence that your idea of English grammar is just as limited as your self-complacency is unlimited. “He is no native speaker” is perfectly correct, exactly as “he is no fool” or “he is no gentleman”. That’s the basic English you are to learn yet.
As for the rest of your claims about my presumable “mistakes”: may I introduce to you my friend Google? It will provide you with the evidence that your claims were untrue.
Otherwise, try to provide any substantiation for your innuendos, Mr. Bla-Blah-Blah.

Pettifogger? What are you talking about? You interfered in our dispute and started to lecture me, while the only reasoning you proved to be capable to offer was to point at such a minor and (as I have shown above) absolutely irrelevant detail as the verb’s grammatical form and then, confining yourself to mere assertions, completely disregarding an explicit indication that the rule in question is conditional (i.e., not obligatory), and, making no attempt to perceive the gist (rather than the details), insist on the detail’s utter importance.
That is, you were splitting hairs – and I’m a “pettifogger”, huh?! A typically liberoid tactic of slander… ;-)
Or am I a pettifogger because I always corroborate my statements while you prefer to speak in platitudes?
Or because I always stick to the point rather than give people the runaround like you do?
BTW, you, as usually, have lost an article: “by getting a lesser pettifogger” would have been correct.
Still sounds awkward in English though. “Trying to be not that much of a pettifogger” would go smoother. You may want to extend your crash course in English to stylistics, too.

Not necessarily. Frequently the authors are experts in the subject or graduate students, whether voluntarily, or assigned to do so by their doctoral advisers. I told you this before, but you appear to hold true to your tactic of ignoring uncomfortable arguments.

This is the principle of any encyclopedia including Britannica. You are simply not educated enough in the matter. Do you really believe that Britannica includes studies started from scratch, rather than compilations of those already available? ;-)

1) If you had any idea of the scientific world, you would certainly know that a single source is never considered “wholly exhaustive”. (“i>Wholly exhaustive”, by the way, as a pleonasm, sounds to me stylistically redundant – could be a topic for your future crash course in stylistics).
2) Wiki as a project is a new development, and this is no surprise that its reputation lags behind its actual quality. How many years did it take the Western nations to accept that Japanese stereos, cars, and other manufacture are quality goods?
3) Not “refer”, but “refer to”, Mr. Non-Native-Speaker-Superior-To-Native-Speakers.

I really love it when people emphatically positioning themselves as anti-Marxists keep living from the Marxian legacy. ;-)
However, I have to disagree with the idea: practice cannot be a truth criterion since we never deal with practice/facts as such, but always with our vision/interpretation of such practice/facts and its/their results.
Therefore, I can only accept predictive power as such a criterion.

But this is, again, of no significance to what you’re trying to establish here as “the truth”. First, as I noted above, it is only a matter of time until (certain) Wiki articles will be widely accepted on a par with those in Britannica. People just need time to get accustomed to this.

Second, the very fact that Britannica is (and (certain articles of) Wiki will be) considered as a reliable source is/will be due to their actual quality only to a certain extent: marketing has very much the same relevance here as anywhere else. For some, even the Bible is a “reliable” source. ;-)



Profane is rather your idea of science. Earlier you showed your failure to realize that, for a true scholar, NO single source can be regarded as “wholly exhaustive” (not even a High Court of Justice ruling ), and now you reveal your complete ignorance when it comes to the concept of a peer review.

The FAZ article reported a review of 42 articles in both Britannica and Wiki conducted by the experts in respective subjects, who had been engaged by Nature (I hope you credit the journal’s editors with at least an ability to choose the right people). The findings showed that errors in Wiki averaged 4 per article vs. 3 in Britannica, totaling 162 vs. 123. Specifically, their articles about Dmitri Mendeleev contained 19 vs. 8 errors, and those on Paul Dirac, 9 vs. 10.

As you can see, the Wiki record was only 30 per cent worse, than that of B., and sometimes (the Paul Dirac input) it even could be (slightly) superior to B. Do not forget that the test was conducted in 2005, i.e., 4 years after the project had commenced and 6 years from now. So assuming constant and linear improvement one can reliably expect both sources to be of at least comparable quality nowadays. In fact, some Wiki articles can be (and are) of much better quality, than those of B.

In other words, your claim that this peer review

is as usually complete BS. Any reasonable person would confirm that the findings of this clearly scientific research (an expert evaluation based on a quite representative sample) are credible and worth serious attention, while the – as always, absolutely unfounded – allegations of a jerk like you, who is only able to cite his own enlightened opinion, or those of anonymous “former KGB generals”, or ludicrous sources/conspiracy theories, aren’t worth a tinkers’ cuss.

Hadn’t you the logical abilities of a toothbrush, you would have noticed, of course, that the Britannica article could also have been – in precisely the same way as you did – named “a private point of view of one of encyclopedias”. But you haven’t. Why does it come as no surprise to me?
It’s the economy science, stupid! © 
By the way, Nature is not a magazine, as you described it, but rather a journal. Why does it come as no surprise to me that “an expert in English” like you  cannot tell the difference?

To avoid disputing this thesis in general (what would be too long and is not our purpose) I would only mention that your proven inferior intelligence obviously disabled you from noticing the time heterogeneity as applied to our situation. Indeed, the rise of Britannica’s reputation falls on the decades when a project like Wiki would simply have not been technically possible.

This failure of yours is no coincidence, but rather a remarkable illustration (among a series of others) of how deficient your manner of arguing is. Your primitive tactic is to chronically rely on names (argumentum ad verecundiam), the “take it from me, young man”-style assertions (which mostly prove to be crap), barefaced lies, or trivialities that, as soon as we apply elementary logic to them, turn out either stupid, or irrelevant, or, as in this specific case, both.

In a word, you are a cheap and stupid demagogue, mister.

The reason was fairly simple: as soon as you (as always, not bothering to furnish any supporting evidence) claimed Britannica’s indisputable superiority to Wiki, I immediately recalled this 2005 Frankfurter Allgemeine article (I still used to read the paper that time) and, since I could remember, where exactly I had read the report, I could easily find it at the FAZ website. I could probably, based on this info, find also some links in English, but did not deem it necessary. After all, if you didn’t understand this German source, you only needed to say, and I would have told you, what it was all about. But if you claim you know German, what’s the problem at all?
Your appeal to the language of the Ockham’s Razor article (English) is a familiar demonstration of your inability to think logically: the Frankfurter Allgemeine article is not about Ockham’s Razor, the principle has not even been mentioned in it; the article is about Wiki’s quality as a source in general; therefore, the language here could have been optional; even the Chinese would have worked, if understandable to both of us.

I, on my part, have two counter-questions.

First, what’s the point in your posting garbage without any references whatsoever? Do you believe this practice to be any better, than my solid references in German?

Second, what was the point in your demanding to discuss the Ockham’s Razor issues in English? Because of your assumption that the level of understanding strongly correlates with the level of language skills? But I have explained to you in my previous posting that your assumption had been wrong from the very outset; beyond that I successfully demonstrated that my English proficiency was at least not inferior to yours. And nevertheless you stick to English at this Russian-speaking forum.

The explanation is pretty straightforward: you bluntly tried to boast your English skills, while neglecting both their irrelevance to the subject itself, and the fact that many forum participants would have not be able to follow and contribute to the discussion.

This is also why you’ve lost a clue when the boasting failed to produce the desirable effect.

This is also why you immediately suspected me of boasting my German (while the actual reason was of purely technical nature).

This is also why you were so eager to imply I am lacking experience abroad (wrong assumption again, but irrelevant in terms of our dispute anyway).

And this is also the reason why it doesn’t make any sense to me to use English as the first language in our dispute any further – unless you indicate any considerable benefits credibly attributable to the idea. Were you a native speaker in English, the language practice could be such justification, but your level is no challenge for me, I’m afraid, Sir. ;-)

BTW, you made a mistake again: not “What the point”, but “What’s the point” (a verb here is a must).

So you acknowledge that the benefits of references routinely provided in research papers are not clear to you? This is no surprise to me or any unbiased reader of our intercourse, since I have already proven above that you have no idea of proper scientific research.

It obviously doesn’t. Otherwise you would have been able to specify.

The part in parentheses [not brackets! Brackets look like this one:] claims that original research is superior to both B and W (as both are only secondary/tertiary sources), while the part prior to the parentheses claims that among the two secondary/tertiary sources the one allowing for scientific references (and hence, facilitating more profound insight for the reader) is superior. Where is the promised “contradiction”, stupido? It is but a working of your deformed imagination and inferior logical abilities.

What you call “the meaning itself” is in fact also an interpretation. Your interpretation. Even though you fail to realise this. And I proved above that your interpretation is wrong (as inconsistent with the “beyond necessity” clause).

By citing experts’ research in the subject? Your made my day with this imbecile remark aimed at disguising the fact that you failed even to address the Wiki quotations from scientific research, which support my point, let alone counter them.

I am also a proud owner of a Britannica software edition, but the article on Ockham’s Razor in there is word-for-word the same stub as that at B’s website. However, the 3 CDs my edition was supplied on obviously contain less that 4.5 Gb, so there is some chance that your edition is more comprehensive. (I am 99.9 per cent confident this is not the case, but I generously afford you an opportunity to make your point).

So why wouldn’t you come up with a quotation from the more extended Britannica’s article you pretend to dispose of?

When was your software released and what is its name, btw? I want to compare it with mine.

Oh, enlighten me, Mr. Demagogue! Quote “your Britannicas” to confute my arguments and Wiki’s assertions.

Or were you just bluffing, Mr. Loudmouth, and your Britannicas’ articles are in no way more profound, than those available on the Internet?

Sorry that the expression proved unintelligible with your level of intelligence. I didn’t mean it, actually.
Also accept my congratulations: the phrase sounds awful in English with such word order (“I leave your phrase … without comment(s)” is recommendable).

In contrast to your bawler habits, I always corroborate what I think/say – and so good that you so far were always incapable of disproving my statements.

But this seems to be no problem for a brainless loudmouth like you, doesn’t it?

Is it a “misinterpretation of “tend” ” because you prefer to think so, or you would take a risk and try to substantiate your claim somehow?

Do you claim that Britannica, as a source, is ranked above the scientific research proper among the academy, Mr. Blah-Blah-Blah? Do you claim this?! Say it!

Does this mean that you happen to know who wrote Britannica’s article on Ockham’s Razor? Please reveal it to the public, Mr. Bawler!

What compilation, Mr. Swindler? Wiki offers direct quotations from academic publications and references to academic source where you can find more quotations.

Again: BS! I have explained in my previous posting why this was not true.

Do you know those of Britannica’s authors? Obviously, not! And notwithstanding this, you never mind that you
you.
Or do you, Mr. Illogical?

Yours is much, much funnier, believe me!

This does not matter at the end of the day, as long as the peer review found that the final results were compatible for both encyclopedias. If a technique renders results compatible with those delivered by another one, why consider it inferior?
But you appear to be incapable of perceiving even such simple ideas, don’t you, Mr. Stupid?

Tell me the famous name of the Britannica author who wrote the Ockham’s Razor article.

Or is it again one of the dozens of incidents where you cannot support you claims with any sort of evidence? ;-)

By the way, those invited by Nature for a peer review were scholars as well. Had not you mention that, Mr. Brainless?

So, you keep insisting that Britannica is based on independent research of its own, rather than on compilations of earlier studies published by other sources? Ho! Ho! Ho! You clearly have not the faintest idea of what encyclopedias in principle are. Or can you provide some substantiation for this belief of yours?

Was just a joke… Of course, a loudmouth like you cannot. You hardly know what a substantiation is…

Why not? Because this was another nail in the coffin of your theory? Or can you provide some corroboration for this claim of yours?

Was just a joke… Of course, a loudmouth like you cannot. You hardly know what a corroboration is…

Well, well, well… And this guy complained about a “pettifogging discussion”… 

First, to improve your English: “except direct ones.
Second, please suggest your own translation of sine neccesitate different to that in Wiki/Britannica. If you can’t, why should the language matter?

… in view of the fact that the loudmouth I was disputing against never even bothered to provide any reasonable justification for his ridiculous assertions.

P.S. Not surprisingly, you preferred not to address some of my points, e.g.:
* Even if I were unable to write decent English, this would not necessarily imply my poor reading comprehension
* Why communicate in English, and not in Russian, or German, or Kannada?
* Contrary to the prevailing opinion, Wiki’s inputs are authored by experts in the subject and followed up and scrutinised by other contributors. So the resource is no rubbish bin filled by the first comer.
* Quotations from academic research in Wiki that support my point
* Anti-razors that have been created by Leibniz, Kant, and Karl Menger
* Your entirely unfounded remark about my translation: “I found it remarkably inaccurate”. Why? Any suggestions for improvement?
* etc.

P.P.S. More evidence on your deficient English skills:
* how to use themodal forms – article not needed
* I also cautiously should note – wrong word order
* When one writing any scientific study – When one iswriting
* as having not need to further sophistication – What is this rubbish supposed to mean?
* As an initial meaning of the phrase seen to be clear – As theinitial meaning of the phrase is seen to be clear
* Some one agrees with this, some one doesn't – 1. Someone. 2. Someone would agree… (s.o. wouldn’t)
* But it is NOT of – Why “of”?
* highlights insignificance of the fact – 1) An article is lacking (the insignificance of). 2) Stylistically deficient