51–60 of 131 posts
Why not use PROLOG then, is the essence of cause and effect in programming. And also can expound syllogisms.
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.
Not so sure one should take stories about who said something in ancient times at face value ;)
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.
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…
Koller and Friedman write in "Probabilistic Graphical Models" about the "clarity test", so that state variables should be clear for an all seeing observer. States like "human_activity" are not objectively measurable. Fairly PGMs and causal models are not the same, but this way of thinking about state variables is an incredible good filter.
Well, or at least they would need a heavy dose of operationalisation.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
If you take multiple systems and make them work in concert, you just get a bigger system.
Isn't this like Cyc? There have been a couple of interesting articles about that on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43625474 "Obituary for Cyc" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40069298 "Cyc: History's Forgotten AI Project"
It's a bit odd that their paper doesn't even mention CYC once.
Why not use PROLOG then, is the essence of cause and effect in programming. And also can expound syllogisms.
The conditional relation represented in prolog, and in any deductive system, is material implication (~PvQ), not causation. You can encode causal relationships with material implication but you’re still going to need to discover those causal relationships in the world somehow.
"A causes B" usually implies that A and B are positively correlated, i.e. P(A and B) > P(A)×P(B), but even that isn't always the case, namely when there is some common cause which counteracts this correlation.
Thinking about this, it seems that if A causes B, the correlation between A and B is at least stronger than it would have been otherwise.
This counterfactual difference in correlation strength is plausibly the "causal strength" between A and B. Though it doesn't indicate the causal direction, as correlation is symmetric.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
That doesn't make much sense. If you take multiple systems and make them work in concert, you just get a bigger system.
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.
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.
But when a doctor tells the lawyer that they operated a person, the lawyer can reasonably say "huh" - the concept of a person has shifted with the context.