"This isn't right," "It's not even wrong." — Wolfgang Pauli said of a student's physics paper.
This quote is coming back in the modern era of internet-based misinformation pundits in many domains, including project management and software development processes. Pauli's quote combines utter contempt on the one hand with philosophical profundity on the other.
"not even wrong" refers to things so speculative there would be no way ever to know whether they're right or wrong," according to Peter Woit, a mathematician at Columbia University who runs the weblog Not Even Wrong (www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/blog/).
The principle of falsifiability is started with the philosopher Karl Popper. Any hypotheses that might be wrong are the lifeblood of science. The hypothesis is tested, the evidence is found to support or undermine the hypotheses, and knowledge is gained in the process. But for hypotheses that can't even be wrong, Popper maintained, can't tell you anything.
Popper argues, knowledge only progresses, when falsifiable claims about the world get proven wrong. In his classic example, you can never confirm the statement "all swans are white", because there might always be some non-white swans you haven't seen yet. But it only takes one black swan to falsify the claim definitively. At that point, you really know something for certain: not all swans are white.
By the way, the Black Swan analogy as a rare event is inverted in Australia, where Black Swans are thick as flies. So the White Swan analogy of a rare event needs to be used when down under.
So of course when we hear some theory in the project management domain that has no basis in principle, no testable evidence and is essentially a cockamamie idea violating the rules of managerial finance, microeconomics of decision making in the presence of uncertainty, and any sense of business governance of other people's money - think of Pauli and his student.
