Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ontology Is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags (2005)

shirky.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 94 posts

Re: Ontology Is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags (2005)

#41

Post by fluorocarbon »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #7

I enjoyed this piece, mostly because I disagree so strongly with it :-). Clay takes the topic of Ontology, contextualizes it into an impractical domain, and then calls it overrated. Cars are overrated too because they can't cross oceans right? When done correctly, ontology combined with knowledge graphs can make an impractical problem much more practical. Consider for the moment the problem of 'fake news'. What chara…

> Consider for the moment the problem of 'fake news' ... without getting into the debate of what is and isn't true

This comment reminds me of another Shirky essay [1]. He says:

> [This is] the pattern for descriptions of the Semantic Web. First, take some well-known problem. Next, misconstrue it so that the hard part is made to seem trivial and the trivial part hard. Finally, congratulate yourself for solving the trivial part.

The difficult part is figuring out exactly what is and what isn't true. If we had a perfect map of reality it would be easy to detect fake news. In fact we wouldn't need any news at all or journalists or anyone else except the people who build the ontology.

[1] http://www.shirky.com/writings/herecomeseverybody/semantic_s...

Re: Ontology Is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags (2005)

#42

Post by whatshisface »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #40
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is, whoever controls the corpus of "established true facts" controls the determination of whether something is or is not fake news. Which probably gets us to competing corpuses (corpi?) of "established true facts", run by those who push competing meta-narratives. Which looks rather similar to the current situation...

Exactly so. The operator of the machine gets to control what it is told is 'true' and 'false'. That said, assuming a nominally good actor and an inability to have people process every article, this process provides a means to quantitatively analyze for coherence with your controlled corpus.

"Quantitatively analysing the coherence of a controlled corpus," is not exactly a solution to fake news, although it's probably useful for a few other things.

Re: Ontology Is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags (2005)

#43

Post by spydum »

mayneack wrote: post #2

All I see is a giant ad for ED pills. This is what I see: https://archive.fo/rZchC over time: https://archive.fo/http://www.shirky.com/writings/ontology_o...

Really common malvertising attack, server is probably compromised: https://www.welivesecurity.com/2013/05/07/linuxcdorked-malwa...

Re: Ontology Is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags (2005)

#44

Post by whatshisface »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #38
whatshisface wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pure contrast isn't enough to hint at falsity, I could tell you a technical detail about what I did today and it would have a 0% overlap with any article on CNN.com. In addition, correlation with your pre-existing beliefs is not sufficient evidence for truth, because today you are wrong about at least a few things. If you look at any given point in history and assume you aren't too special, the first thing you'll rea…

I agree with this too, and certainly articles about different topics will have high contrast and low correlation. IBM patented[1] some work we did at Blekko to figure out the topic of a document from its components and that is an essential first step. It also fails when there are few streams to compare, as when a new story first breaks. Or when there is coordination of actors. My suggestion is not that it is fail saf…

>It also fails when there are few streams to compare, as when a new story first breaks. Or when there is coordination of actors.

All of these things are hallmarks of fake news: it is claimed to be new (hence "news",) is not published very widely (you can't compare a aquariusrising.biz article on Green Space Aliens to a CNN article on the same, because there isn't a CNN article on that), and it's usually coordinated between copycat opportunists. Even worse, none of these things are distinguishable from a grassroots report unless you know the true news a-priori. This better not be a mechanism to ban everything that isn't on CNN.com.

Re: Ontology Is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags (2005)

#45

Post by skybrian »

thedailymail wrote: post #39

I enjoyed reading this article, but was perplexed at the statement "Cities are real. They are real, physical facts. Countries are social fictions." City names and boundaries are just as, if nor more, socially constructed as those of countries.

This is true of names and borders, but the cities themselves remain where they are even when names and borders change, so they're more persistent than countries.

Re: Ontology Is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags (2005)

#46

Post by maxerickson »

sonnyblarney wrote: post #29

This is a great post. The problem with the thesis is that just because classical ontology doesn't work for the entire internet, doesn't mean that we can't apply it in many domains. Formal ontology could be used very well in a variety of areas. Informal, or less concise ontology again in many areas. And leave tagging for the rest.

Aren't tagging and "informal ontology" pretty much equivalent?

Re: Ontology Is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags (2005)

#47

Post by gases »

Ugh. This is a priceless example of the kind of quackery that puts us in turing tarpits by trying to extricate us from turing tarpits.

If you ever hear phrases like “pure functional” or “object oriented” or “semantic web” or “restful uris” or “inversion of control” or “impedance mismatch” just run away.

The person you are talking to does not have the answer. Is trying to sound like they do. Is pouring glasses of kool aid.

Case in point: Noble Gases.

Okay?

Listen. They’re gases. Unrefridgerated? Contained in pressure vessels? In a laboratory setting? They are gases.

This is where you see the rubber leave the road. He has never worked with gases. Doesn’t think about them as gases. Wants to lead you down a rabbit hole of plasma bound by cosmological gravitation, cryogenic dewar flasks, rocket ships, tokamaks, and anything else to light your imagination on fire and lead you over the precipice and into a holy war that need not be fought.

The periodic table is indeed periodic. It’s stable now, but it does change. We knew noble gases were special, before we knew about valence electrons, orbitals, the UV catastrophy and so on.

So when he says that helium should not be classified as a gas, he’s wrong, because that fact is a useful means of reflecting upon the manner of discovery for that class of elements, which indeed was one of THE KEYS, that unlocks the very idea of chemical bonds, be they covalent, ionic, hydrogen or otherwise.

Do call noble gases, gases.

Post reply on HN