Occam's Donkey???

Why Occam's Donkey? Well, it's my combination of Occam's Razor and a composite of a number of different donkeys in philosophy, literature and film - Shrek's Donkey, Buridan's ass and Benjamin from George Orwell's novel Animal Farm.

Occam's Razor is the well known scientific rule of thumb that holds that "All other things being equal, the simplest solution is the best." There is of course much more to it than that and the Wikipedia link above is a good place to start (it is instructive in Wikipedia to also look at the discussion pages). William of Occam (or Ockham) was the 14th-century English Franciscan friar and philosopher upon whose views the razor was based.

My composite donkey will ask sceptical questions (Benjamin), including "... are we there yet?" (Shrek's Donkey), but hopefully not irrationally "die" of hunger, caught between two haystacks (Buridan's ass).

Occam's Donkey will mainly be about three ideas - critical thinking, evidence supported practice and busting bullshit. These ideas will be explored within widely different domains, including education, medicine and associated fields, business, sport and the military.

The South African paediatrician and poet, C. Louis Leipoldt, at that time the editor of the South African Medical Journal, wrote in July of 1927:

"Nowhere perhaps is the public so ill educated concerning quackery as in South Africa. Our chief cities are honeycombed with faddists, sects and denominations, and the countryside still welters in original ignorance, superimposed on a stratum of bigotry and prejudice.”

He also decried the “... gross stupidity of legislators who are fit representatives of a public that delights in quackery.”

In South Africa, and it seems the same in the rest of the world, little has changed in the 80 years since these words were written by Leipoldt. In fact, I believe that the situation is often worse now than then.

I know that Occam's Donkey will be one of hundreds, if not thousands, of blogs that propose critical thinking, good science and rational discource as solutions to Leipoldt's problem. The rhetorical question will often arise, however: "Are we there yet?"