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

CauseNet: Towards a causality graph extracted from the web

causenet.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 131 posts

Re: CauseNet: Towards a causality graph extracted from the web

#41

Post by Xmd5a »

tossandthrow wrote: post #23
tgv wrote: post #14

This makes little sense to me. Ontologies and all that have been tried and have always been found to be too brittle. Take the examples from the front page (which I expect to be among the best in their set): human_activity => climate_change. Those are such a broad concepts that it's practically useless. Or disease => death. There's no nuance at all. There isn't even a definition of what "disease" is, let alone a way t…

Ontology, not ontologies, have been tried. We have quite a good understanding that a system cannot be both sound a complete, regardless people went straight in to make a single model of the world.

Could you define sound and complete in this context ? IIRC Rust's borrow checker is sound (will not mark something dysfunctional as functional) but not complete: some programs would take too long to verify, the checker times out, and compilation fails even though the program is potentially correct.

Re: CauseNet: Towards a causality graph extracted from the web

#42

Post by asplake »

tgv wrote: post #14

This makes little sense to me. Ontologies and all that have been tried and have always been found to be too brittle. Take the examples from the front page (which I expect to be among the best in their set): human_activity => climate_change. Those are such a broad concepts that it's practically useless. Or disease => death. There's no nuance at all. There isn't even a definition of what "disease" is, let alone a way t…

Agreed. About the strongest we can hope for are causal mechanisms, and most of those will be at most hypotheses and/or partial explanations that only apply under certain conditions.

Honestly, I don’t know understand how these so-ontologies have persisted. Who is investing in this space, and why?

Re: CauseNet: Towards a causality graph extracted from the web

#43

Post by vintermann »

morpheuskafka wrote: post #37
vintermann wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I understand it, this is a dataset of claimed causation. It should contain vaccines->autism, not because it's true, but because someone, in public, claimed that it was. So, by design, it's pretty useless for finding new, true causes. But maybe it's useful for something else, such as teaching a model what a causal claim is in a deeper sense? Or mapping out causal claims which are related somehow? Or conflicting? Ei…

Also, it seems to mistake some definitions as causes. A coronavirus isn't "claimed" to cause SARS. Rather, SARS is a name given to the disease cause by a certain coronavirus. Or alternatively, the name SARS-nCov-1 is the name given to the virus which causes SARS. Whichever way you want to see it. For a more obvious example, saying "influenza virus causes influenza" is a tautology, not a causal relationship. If influe…

Yes, I agree there are a lot of definitions or descriptions masquerading as explanations, especially in medicine and psychology. I think maybe insurance has a lot to do that. If you just describe a lot of symptoms, insurance won't know whether to cover it or not. But if you authoritatively name that symptom set as "BWZK syndrome" or something, and suddenly switch to assuming "BWZK syndrome" is a thing, the unknown cause to the symptoms, then insurance has something it can deal with.

But this description->explanation thing, whatever the reason, is just another error people make. It's not that different from errors like "vaccines cause autism". Any dataset collecting causal claims people make is going to contain a lot of nonsense.

Re: CauseNet: Towards a causality graph extracted from the web

#44

Post by hugh-avherald »

dr_dshiv wrote: post #34
tgv wrote: post #14

This makes little sense to me. Ontologies and all that have been tried and have always been found to be too brittle. Take the examples from the front page (which I expect to be among the best in their set): human_activity => climate_change. Those are such a broad concepts that it's practically useless. Or disease => death. There's no nuance at all. There isn't even a definition of what "disease" is, let alone a way t…

Democritus (b 460BCE) said, “I would rather discover one cause than gain the kingdom of Persia,” which suggests that finding true causes is rather difficult.

Or is less of a hassle.

Re: CauseNet: Towards a causality graph extracted from the web

#47

Post by kachnuv_ocasek »

tossandthrow wrote: post #23
tgv wrote: post #14

This makes little sense to me. Ontologies and all that have been tried and have always been found to be too brittle. Take the examples from the front page (which I expect to be among the best in their set): human_activity => climate_change. Those are such a broad concepts that it's practically useless. Or disease => death. There's no nuance at all. There isn't even a definition of what "disease" is, let alone a way t…

Ontology, not ontologies, have been tried. We have quite a good understanding that a system cannot be both sound a complete, regardless people went straight in to make a single model of the world.

> a system cannot be both sound a complete

Huh, what do you mean by this? There are many sound and complete systems – propositional logic, first-order logic, Presburger arithmetic, the list goes on. These are the basic properties you want from a logical or typing system. (Though, of course, you may compromise if you have other priorities.)

Re: CauseNet: Towards a causality graph extracted from the web

#49

Post by tomaskafka »

tgv wrote: post #14

This makes little sense to me. Ontologies and all that have been tried and have always been found to be too brittle. Take the examples from the front page (which I expect to be among the best in their set): human_activity => climate_change. Those are such a broad concepts that it's practically useless. Or disease => death. There's no nuance at all. There isn't even a definition of what "disease" is, let alone a way t…

But “disease => death” + AI => surely at least few billion in VC funding.

Re: CauseNet: Towards a causality graph extracted from the web

#50

Post by lemonwaterlime »

kachnuv_ocasek wrote: post #47
tossandthrow wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ontology, not ontologies, have been tried. We have quite a good understanding that a system cannot be both sound a complete, regardless people went straight in to make a single model of the world.

> a system cannot be both sound a complete Huh, what do you mean by this? There are many sound and complete systems – propositional logic, first-order logic, Presburger arithmetic, the list goes on. These are the basic properties you want from a logical or typing system. (Though, of course, you may compromise if you have other priorities.)

My take is that the GP was implicitly referring to Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems with the implication being that a system that reasons completely about all the human topics and itself is not possible. Therefore, you’d need multiple such systems (plural) working in concert.
Post reply on HN