Is Parsimony Always Desirable: Response to Sivo and Willson, Hoyle, Markus, Mulaik, Tweedledee, Tweedledum, the Cheshire Cat, and Others

Abstract Marsh and Hau reply briefly to remarkably diverse comments by Sivo and Willson (1998), Hoyle (1998), Markus (1998), Mulaik (1998), and others to their earlier article (Marsh & Hau, 1996). Sivo and Willson provided a discussion of alternative–moving-average and autoregressive-moving-average–models that seemed only tangentially related to the Marsh and Hau article. Hoyle largely accepted Marsh and Hau's major contentions, but proposed an alternative representation of parsimony. Markus provided a highly literary and entertaining looking-glass perspective as a dialogue involving himself, Tweedledum, Tweedledee, the Cheshire Cat, and the Mad Hatter from Lewis Carroll's Wonderland in which he compared SM (Stan Mulaik) and SM (Straw Man) propositions. This was followed logically by Mulaik's righteous outrage with Marsh and Hau's total lack of understanding of parsimony as espoused by Mulaik and his (Occam's) razor gang, all but threatening “Off with their heads,” in the vein of yet another Lewis Carroll character, to which Marsh and Hau respond with an analogy from another literary work–The Emperor's New Clothes–and a rapprochement/compromise.