23 The Parsimony Principle in the decision process

Here’s a very interesting take on the decision process: the Parsimony Principle. Parsimony, without referring to the dictionary, is the art of making more with less, of extracting the last bit from a thing or activity, of achieving the most with the least resources. In this respect it is not different from the efficiency principle or maximizing returns and minimizing costs. But it goes beyond that; it implies, in life decisions, the principle of reducing the demand for resources, and is concerned with avoiding needless activity. It therefore refers not only to the ladder (the means), but also where you put it, the wall you want to climb (the end)!

I heard a very instructive story from an associate of yore (he retired to farm pigs, and I’ve not been in touch for some years!) that nicely illustrates the Parsimony Principle. I may say, in fact, that I owe this insight to his story. He was a man who liked to befriend judges, and they depended on him to sort out things with officialdom. One such exalted personage asked him to get an exemption from octroi payment (that’s the taxes they levy on the border between states or provinces of a country) for a new fridge he was getting from the neighbouring state (to take advantage of a lower sales tax, perhaps). My friend’s reaction was: Pay the five dollars! To get the octroi waived, he would have had to approach every rung from the State headquarters down to the guard at the last gate, and the personage’s name would have had to be dragged through the mud and muck of all these offices. So, just pay up, and do not grumble! This is an admirable application of the Parsimony principle: keep your influence and contacts for the big things, don’t fritter it away for a trivial matter!

 One aspect of the way this principle works itself out is in getting things done:  go to the lowest level feasible. People often pride themselves on ‘going straight to the top’, for instance if your coffee is not piping hot, you will phone up the Chairman of the airlines or hotel chain. This only establishes your own inflated sense of your self-importance, and not your importance as such. I once overheard just such a self-important bozo berating a girl on the ground staff of the airlines for a 15-minute delay in the flight: he was asking her the telephone number of her Chairman to complain. I remember one of the things she said: I work in this job because I love to serve, and not just for the pay. Going to the top, or threatening to do so, only exposes  you as a jerk, and does not elicit better service! An honest approach to the guy (or gal) on the spot usually works better.

Another story illustrating this principle: as the police verification for my wife’s passport was taking time, I was tempted to go over the head of the police constable responsible for this right to the Police Superintendent. To tell the truth, I wanted the certificate without my wife actually being in that place (in station, as they put in official-speak). The top man, far from expediting the certificate, hauled up the constable for taking up the case without the physical presence of the subject! The constable later came to me and reproached me for going over his head; for showing extra smartness, when he was doing it his way and would have got us the certificate on his own time. It’s a different story that we finally got the passport with the help of a Foreign Service uncle; but at the field level, it doesn’t pay to be too smart, or ‘over-smart’ in the local idiom!

These are just stories, but the principle is that you choose a solution that makes maximum use of existing resources before going to new resources. Often, we want to change the whole system, instead of tweaking the offending small portion of it that is causing the problem. Ever since the economy was given a fillip by reducing tariffs and liberalizing the issue of licenses, people have started asking for major ‘structural changes’ rather than ‘business as usual’. But this may be enormously wasteful of resources, and play into the hands of those self-interested persons who want to milk the system for their own windfall gains. If there is a damp patch on your wall, for example, you will investigate its cause and perhaps realize your drains need cleaning, rather than breaking down your whole house and rebuilding it. Your contractor may, however, like to inveigle you into scrapping the whole structure: beware the slippery slope of home improvements! Similarly for other things in life.

The 20:80 'rule' (post #11) is in fact another nice illustration of the Parsimony principle. If we can make do with that 80% of what we want out of something, we need only invest 20% of the resources that would be required to satisfy all our imagined wants. As Gandhi said, we have enough to satisfy all our needs, but not our greeds. The cost of satisfying all our greeds is a whopping 80% of our resources; a parsimonious approach would satisfy 80% of our desires (by no means a self-denying satisfaction level) with one-fifth the resources! Who said you cannot have it all and retire to a happy holiday home?

To summarize, search for the simplest explanation and try the simplest fixes that will demand the least resources. Go to the lowest level at which your work can be done. In science, also, those hypotheses have the greatest chance of persisting that require the least number of special assumptions and can explain the largest proportion of cases with the least number of exceptions. It is termed ‘Occam’s Razor’, I believe, in the jargon of the logic of scientific thinking.