Ontology Is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags (2005) • Hacker News Board

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

#31

Post by desc » Wed, Jan 23, 2019, 12:39 AM UTC

burtonator wrote: post #28

I've been working on a tag-centric document manager for the last 90 days: https://getpolarized.io/ It allows you to tag and manage everything you're reading and the primary management metaphor is the 'tag'. It's a central repository for all your reading. PDFs, web content, and it supports annotation (highlights, comments, etc). There are a bunch of clear wins here. Related tags are awesome. You can build a bunch of r…

Tags do not fit spatial memory. Tags are utterly worthless in any spatial context.

You're at the mercy of a search engine's implementation and index foibles for finding things through search queries.

A hierarchy maps onto our spatial memory, which we use to figure out where we've been and go back to it.

There's a lot to be said for maintaining spatial metaphors in information space.

Another little detail here is that spatial organisation (in meatspace) is a shared environment. A single 'shared' ontology is useful even if it's nonsense, because it's still a shared frame of reference in which navigational directions can be shared.

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

#32

Post by platz » Wed, Jan 23, 2019, 12:49 AM UTC

Queue up the quotes from "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance"

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

#33

Post by whatshisface » Wed, Jan 23, 2019, 12:51 AM UTC

ChuckMcM wrote: post #18

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure about that. In Shannon's Information Theory, stuff that aligns with the existing knowledge base contains 0 bits of information. Things that contain new information cannot line up with the existing knowledge base; "news" is exactly the word for such things. You might be able to say that fake news doesn't align with true facts that aren't part of the facts being reported as news. That is you can tell that…

I think that is exactly right. So lets say you consider a news story as a 'stream' of bits. And you can demodulate those bits using some formula and there are enough extra bits in the message that you can correct for errors in the channel. If you get 5 streams of bits and four of them correlate with some epsilon number of new bits, and the fifth has 10x epsilon new bits, one of things is likely true. Either the odd s…

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 realize is that one if not many of the things that are repeated daily in our society are almost certainly false if not outright lies: after all, that claim is true about every other historical period and people group, so why shouldn't it be true about us today?

To suggest a specific example, imagine a person living inside WWII-era Germany correlating a propaganda news article with every other news article they have read, all of which are also propaganda. Correlation-based news epistemology isn't even based on a prevailing social consensus, it's based on the consensus of broadcasters.

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

#34

Post by dannyobrien » Wed, Jan 23, 2019, 12:55 AM UTC

jrochkind1 wrote: post #19

2005. did what he predicted happen? I think not?

Might be good to add a date to the title.

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

#35

Post by burtonator » Wed, Jan 23, 2019, 1:03 AM UTC

desc wrote: post #31

burtonator wrote: post #28

I've been working on a tag-centric document manager for the last 90 days: https://getpolarized.io/ It allows you to tag and manage everything you're reading and the primary management metaphor is the 'tag'. It's a central repository for all your reading. PDFs, web content, and it supports annotation (highlights, comments, etc). There are a bunch of clear wins here. Related tags are awesome. You can build a bunch of r…

Tags do not fit spatial memory. Tags are utterly worthless in any spatial context. You're at the mercy of a search engine's implementation and index foibles for finding things through search queries. A hierarchy maps onto our spatial memory, which we use to figure out where we've been and go back to it. There's a lot to be said for maintaining spatial metaphors in information space. Another little detail here is that…

Did you read the last part of my comment?

I clarified that there's a workaround to give hierarchy.

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

#36

Post by munificent » Wed, Jan 23, 2019, 1:15 AM UTC

This is one of my favorite articles, which I first read when it was new and still informs how I think about organizing information and the web.

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

#37

Post by AnimalMuppet » Wed, Jan 23, 2019, 1:17 AM UTC

whatshisface wrote: post #33

ChuckMcM wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that is exactly right. So lets say you consider a news story as a 'stream' of bits. And you can demodulate those bits using some formula and there are enough extra bits in the message that you can correct for errors in the channel. If you get 5 streams of bits and four of them correlate with some epsilon number of new bits, and the fifth has 10x epsilon new bits, one of things is likely true. Either the odd s…

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…

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...

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

#38

Post by ChuckMcM » Wed, Jan 23, 2019, 1:19 AM UTC

whatshisface wrote: post #33

ChuckMcM wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that is exactly right. So lets say you consider a news story as a 'stream' of bits. And you can demodulate those bits using some formula and there are enough extra bits in the message that you can correct for errors in the channel. If you get 5 streams of bits and four of them correlate with some epsilon number of new bits, and the fifth has 10x epsilon new bits, one of things is likely true. Either the odd s…

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 safe or perfect, only that is a useful application of an ontology which disputes the original author's thesis that they are overrated.

[1] https://patents.google.com/patent/US10157178B2/

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

#39

Post by thedailymail » Wed, Jan 23, 2019, 1:21 AM UTC

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.

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

#40

Post by ChuckMcM » Wed, Jan 23, 2019, 1:22 AM UTC

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #37

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…

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.