(highlight:: There’s a theory in medicine called diagnostic parsimony. It says doctors should make as few assumptions as possible when diagnosing, settling on the simplest explanation as the most likely.
Doctor John Hickamn once pointed out its limitations. “Patients can have as many diseases as they damn well please,” he said.
A patient is statistically more likely to have a few common ailments than a single big one. Lots of things tend to happen at once, so the push to find one underlying cause to a patient’s ills can lead to false precision at best, misdiagnosis at worst.
It became known as Hickamn’s Dictum, and it’s a useful rule of thumb in many areas of life.)
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- [note::Good to keep in mind when thinking about Occam's Razor]

(highlight:: There’s a theory in medicine called diagnostic parsimony. It says doctors should make as few assumptions as possible when diagnosing, settling on the simplest explanation as the most likely.
Doctor John Hickamn once pointed out its limitations. “Patients can have as many diseases as they damn well please,” he said.
A patient is statistically more likely to have a few common ailments than a single big one. Lots of things tend to happen at once, so the push to find one underlying cause to a patient’s ills can lead to false precision at best, misdiagnosis at worst.
It became known as Hickamn’s Dictum, and it’s a useful rule of thumb in many areas of life.)
- View Highlight
-
- [note::Good to keep in mind when thinking about Occam's Razor]