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McNamara Fallacy
The McNamara fallacy (also known as the quantitative fallacy), named for Robert McNamara, the US Secretary of Defense from 1961 to 1968, involves making a decision based solely on quantitative observations (or metrics) and ignoring all others. The reason given is often that these other observations cannot be proven. The fallacy refers to McNamara's belief as to what led the United States to defeat in the Vietnam War—specifically, his quantification of success in the war (e.g., in terms of enemy body count), ignoring other variables. Examples in warfare The Vietnam War The McNamara fallacy originates from the Vietnam War, in which enemy body counts were taken to be a precise and objective measure of success. War was reduced to a mathematical model: By increasing estimated enemy deaths and minimizing one's own, victory was assured. Critics note that guerrilla warfare, widespread resistance, and inevitable inaccuracies in estimates of enemy casualties can thwart this formula ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Project 100,000
Project 100,000, also known as McNamara's 100,000, McNamara's Folly, McNamara's Morons, and McNamara's Misfits, was a controversial 1960s program by the United States Department of Defense (DoD) to recruit soldiers who would previously have been below military mental or medical standards. Project 100,000 was initiated by Defense Secretary Robert McNamara in October 1966 to meet the escalating manpower requirements of the American government's involvement in the Vietnam War. According to Hamilton Gregory, author of the book ''McNamara's Folly: The Use of Low-IQ Troops in the Vietnam War'', inductees of the project died at higher rates than other Americans serving in Vietnam and following their service had lower incomes and higher rates of divorce than their non-veteran counterparts. The project was ended in December 1971 and has been the subject of controversy, especially during the manpower shortages of the Iraq War. Background At various times in its history, the United States A ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
British Medical Journal
''The BMJ'' is a weekly peer-reviewed medical trade journal, published by the trade union the British Medical Association (BMA). ''The BMJ'' has editorial freedom from the BMA. It is one of the world's oldest general medical journals. Originally called the ''British Medical Journal'', the title was officially shortened to ''BMJ'' in 1988, and then changed to ''The BMJ'' in 2014. The journal is published by BMJ Publishing Group Ltd, a subsidiary of the British Medical Association (BMA). The editor-in-chief of ''The BMJ'' is Kamran Abbasi, who was appointed in January 2022. History The journal began publishing on 3 October 1840 as the ''Provincial Medical and Surgical Journal'' and quickly attracted the attention of physicians around the world through its publication of high-impact original research articles and unique case reports. The ''BMJ''s first editors were P. Hennis Green, lecturer on the diseases of children at the Hunterian School of Medicine, who also was its f ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Verisimilitude
In philosophy, verisimilitude (or truthlikeness) is the notion that some propositions are closer to being true than other propositions. The problem of verisimilitude is the problem of articulating what it takes for one false theory to be closer to the truth than another false theory. This problem was central to the philosophy of Karl Popper, largely because Popper was among the first to affirm that truth is the aim of scientific inquiry while acknowledging that most of the greatest scientific theories in the history of science are, strictly speaking, false. If this long string of purportedly false theories is to constitute progress with respect to the goal of truth, then it must be at least possible for one false theory to be closer to the truth than others. Karl Popper Popper assumed that scientists are interested in highly informative theories, in part for methodological reasons—the more informative a theory, the easier it is to test, and the greater its predictive powe ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Verificationism
Verificationism, also known as the verification principle or the verifiability criterion of meaning, is the philosophical doctrine which maintains that only statements that are empirically verifiable (i.e. verifiable through the senses) are cognitively meaningful, or else they are truths of logic ( tautologies). Verificationism thus rejects statements related to metaphysics, as well as fields such as theology, ethics and aesthetics, as "cognitively meaningless". Such statements may be meaningful in influencing emotions or behaviour, but not in terms of conveying truth value, information or factual content. Verificationism was a central thesis of logical positivism, a movement in analytic philosophy that emerged in the 1920s by philosophers who sought to unify philosophy and science under a common naturalistic theory of knowledge. Origins Although verificationist principles of a general sort—grounding scientific theory in some verifiable experience—are found retrospectively eve ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Truth
Truth is the property of being in accord with fact or reality.Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionarytruth 2005 In everyday language, truth is typically ascribed to things that aim to represent reality or otherwise correspond to it, such as beliefs, propositions, and declarative sentences. Truth is usually held to be the opposite of falsehood. The concept of truth is discussed and debated in various contexts, including philosophy, art, theology, and science. Most human activities depend upon the concept, where its nature as a concept is assumed rather than being a subject of discussion; these include most of the sciences, law, journalism, and everyday life. Some philosophers view the concept of truth as basic, and unable to be explained in any terms that are more easily understood than the concept of truth itself. Most commonly, truth is viewed as the correspondence of language or thought to a mind-independent world. This is called the correspondence theory of truth. Various theo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Surrogation
Surrogation is a psychological phenomenon found in business practices whereby a measure of a construct of interest evolves to replace that construct. Research on performance measurement in management accounting identifies surrogation with "the tendency for managers to lose sight of the strategic construct(s) the measures are intended to represent, and subsequently act as though the measures ''are'' the constructs". An everyday example of surrogation is a manager tasked with increasing customer satisfaction who begins to believe that the customer satisfaction survey score actually '' is'' customer satisfaction. First usage Inspired by work by Yuji Ijiri, the term ''surrogation'' was coined by Willie Choi, Gary Hecht, and Bill Tayler in their paper, "Lost in Translation: The Effects of Incentive Compensation on Strategy Surrogation". They show managers tend to use measures as surrogates for strategy, acting as if measures were in fact the strategy when making optimization decisions. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Streetlight Effect
The streetlight effect, or the drunkard's search principle, is a type of observational bias that occurs when people only search for something where it is easiest to look. Both names refer to a well-known joke: The anecdote is attributed to Nasreddin. According to Idries Shah, this tale is used by many Sufis, commenting upon people who seek exotic sources for enlightenment. Outside of the Nasreddin corpus, the anecdote goes back at least to the 1920s, and has been used metaphorically in the social sciences since at least 1964, when Abraham Kaplan referred to it as "the principle of the drunkard's search". Noam Chomsky, for instance, uses the tale as a picture of how science operates: "Science is a bit like the joke about the drunk who is looking under a lamppost for a key that he has lost on the other side of the street, because that's where the light is. It has no other choice." See also * McNamara fallacy The McNamara fallacy (also known as the quantitative fallacy), na ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Occam's Razor
Occam's razor, Ockham's razor, or Ocham's razor ( la, novacula Occami), also known as the principle of parsimony or the law of parsimony ( la, lex parsimoniae), is the problem-solving principle that "entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity". It is generally understood in the sense that with competing theories or explanations, the simpler one, for example a model with fewer parameters, is to be preferred. The idea is frequently attributed to English Franciscan friar William of Ockham (), a scholastic philosopher and theologian, although he never used these exact words. This philosophical razor advocates that when presented with competing hypotheses about the same prediction, one should select the solution with the fewest assumptions, and that this is not meant to be a way of choosing between hypotheses that make different predictions. Similarly, in science, Occam's razor is used as an abductive heuristic in the development of theoretical models rather than as a rigoro ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Newton's Flaming Laser Sword
Michael D. Alder is an Australian mathematician, formerly an assistant professor at the University of Western Australia. Alder is known for his popular writing, such as sardonic articles about the lack of basic arithmetic skills in young adults. Career Alder received a B.Sc. in physics from Imperial College, then a PhD in algebraic topology from the University of Liverpool, and an M. Eng. Sc. from the University of Western Australia. He was an assistant professor at the University of Western Australia until 2011. Newton's flaming laser sword Newton's flaming laser sword (also known as Alder's razor) is a philosophical razor devised by Alder and discussed in an essay in the May/June 2004 issue of ''Philosophy Now''. Also available as The principle, which addresses the differing views of scientists and philosophers on epistemology and knowledge, was summarized by Alder as follows: In its weakest form it says that we should not dispute propositions unless they can be shown by ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Goodhart's Law
Goodhart's law is an adage often stated as, "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure". It is named after British economist Charles Goodhart, who is credited with expressing the core idea of the adage in a 1975 article on monetary policy in the United Kingdom: It was used to criticize the British Thatcher government for trying to conduct monetary policy on the basis of targets for broad and narrow money, but the law reflects a much more general phenomenon. Priority and background Numerous concepts are related to this idea, at least one of which predates Goodhart's statement. Notably, Campbell's law likely has precedence, as Jeff Rodamar has argued, since various formulations date to 1969. Other academics had similar insights at the time. Jerome Ravetz's 1971 book ''Scientific Knowledge and Its Social Problems'' also predates Goodhart, though it does not formulate the same law. He discusses how systems in general can be gamed, focuses on cases where the goa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Allegory Of The Cave
The Allegory of the Cave, or Plato's Cave, is an allegory presented by the Ancient Greece, Greek philosopher Plato in his work ''Republic (Plato), Republic'' (514a–520a) to compare "the effect of education (Wiktionary:παιδεία, παιδεία) and the lack of it on our physis, nature". It is written as a dialogue between Plato's brother Glaucon and his mentor Socrates, narrated by the latter. The allegory is presented after the analogy of the sun (508b–509c) and the analogy of the divided line (509d–511e). In the allegory "The Cave," Plato describes a group of people who have lived chained to the wall of a cave all their lives, facing a blank wall. The people watch shadows projected on the wall from objects passing in front of a fire behind them and give names to these shadows. The shadows are the prisoners' reality, but are not accurate representations of the real world. The shadows represent the fragment of reality that we can normally perceive through our senses, ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Competitive Examination
An examination (exam or evaluation) or test is an educational assessment intended to measure a test-taker's knowledge, skill, aptitude, physical fitness, or classification in many other topics (e.g., beliefs). A test may be administered verbally, on paper, on a computer, or in a predetermined area that requires a test taker to demonstrate or perform a set of skills. Tests vary in style, rigor and requirements. There is no general consensus or invariable standard for test formats and difficulty. Often, the format and difficulty of the test is dependent upon the educational philosophy of the instructor, subject matter, class size, policy of the educational institution, and requirements of accreditation or governing bodies. A test may be administered formally or informally. An example of an informal test is a reading test administered by a parent to a child. A formal test might be a final examination administered by a teacher in a classroom or an IQ test administered by a psycho ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
