Wednesday, March 31, 2004

I'm reading this paper, never mind which, and it goes on and on about this great theory, and how the world will be better if we all pick it up, etc. This led me to develop a theory of my own, in philosophy and sociology of science. My theory involves classifying scientific theories on the basis of their degree of PATOI, which stands for Providing Acronyms for Trivial and Obvious Ideas. A "soft PATOI" theory is one that, after scattering a lot of verbal smoke, actually emerges with some new and useful ideas. A "pure PATOI" theory is content with simply being PATOI. And there's oh, so many of those.

Example of a PATOI theory?
"PATOI is a SDCF (Self Descriptive Conceptual Framework)".

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