5 ms·

My own feeling is a little bit of scepticism when the headline asks if person rightly heralded for one paradigm shifting invention several decades ago can save

My own feeling is a little bit of scepticism when the headline asks if person rightly heralded for one paradigm shifting invention several decades ago can save us again. That's not to downplay Berners-Lee's historical importance or the usefulness of the stuff covered here, just that we sometimes - at least on a popular level - look to big name saviours which probably says more about the journalist's constraints than the value of the contemporary contribution.

Vinnl 6y ago
I think that's valid, but the flip side of that is that the name alone can also be a factor in its success. For example, there are quite a few other projects that could potentially deal with the NHS's challenges as well, but the question is whether the NHS would have even heard of those, let alone pilot them.
- bryanrasmussen 6y ago
  >but the flip side of that is that the name alone can also be a factor in its success Sure it sounds good, but aside from his big paradigm shifting invention those many years ago he has attempted to do some paradigm shifting things since then that have fallen short. So I think hesitation may be warranted.
bfieidhbrjr 6y ago
It's a reputational thing. We call on the great and the good because they usually have no skin in the game, so they're impartial. They have a reputation to uphold so they'll do the right thing. It cuts through all the local politics and power that caused the problem. See Feynman and the solid rocket booster o rings in the 80's.
- est31 6y ago
  Yeah you can be the smartest person on earth, if nobody listens to you then your advice isn't helpful to society. Not your fault, to be clear, it's society's fault, but that doesn't change anything about the helpfulness. A lot of people give a lot of proposals for how something should be done. What will tell you that the proposal is good? Especially if you are a politician who isn't educated in computer science.
  - usrusr 6y ago
    Also compromises. Exceptional status enables pulling through with uncompromising solutions that would be wildly impossible without that status. Unfortunately, some problems are solved much better with heavy compromises ("listening to every stakeholder"), other problems can only be solved well by an uncompromising solution. The meta-problem is telling one from the other ahead of time. I don't know if that's even possible.
joshspankit 6y ago
I’d argue that his perspectives on interconnected data are not only more deeply thought out for his continual thought on it over the past decades, but they are even more relevant today. I’d also say in a very real way that for reasons beyond his control, the WWW fell short of what Sir Berners-Lee envisioned, giving him the opportunity to start over and make sure it’s on the right course this time.
redwood 6y ago
The thing is, no one else would be able to get the NHS to pilot a platform like this... so while he may be a figurehead, his reputation makes it more conceivable that a next-generation privacy-oriented internet could get off the ground.
- BillinghamJ 6y ago
  The article says the NHS is already piloting it. There is a lot of appetite in government and the GDS-esque groups like NHSX to make significant improvements on these kinds of areas. Many of them have actually been a lot more successful than you'd think, in many very old departments.
Angostura 6y ago
For me though, the thing about TBL is he isn't a glory-hound, my sense of him is he gets involved in interesting problems that he thinks have serious benefits and gets stuck in. He's been thinking and working on this current problem for quite a while, takes it seriously and it is very close to the domain that he has been involved in for decades now. The name may generate some buzz, but I suspect the project may have intrinsic value in its own right.
usrusr 6y ago
I'm torn as well. Part of me is massively envious of a country being able to field TBL for its NHS. That's kind of like getting Banksy to design your birthday invitation cards because he happens to be your neighbor or something like that. Another part of me suspects that he might get seriously lost in overoptimism for some theoretically appealing but highly impractical idea that yields nothing in the end. Ironically, both those parts of me claim to be the one that majored in semantic web. (edit: punctuation for readability)
solarkraft 6y ago
I had a similar thought reading the headline. Is Tim Berners-Lee actually an exceptional guy with repeatable wisdom or just a cool guy who happened to stumble upon the idea of the web?

Vinnl 6y ago

I think that's valid, but the flip side of that is that the name alone can also be a factor in its success. For example, there are quite a few other projects that could potentially deal with the NHS's challenges as well, but the question is whether the NHS would have even heard of those, let alone pilot them.

bryanrasmussen 6y ago
>but the flip side of that is that the name alone can also be a factor in its success Sure it sounds good, but aside from his big paradigm shifting invention those many years ago he has attempted to do some paradigm shifting things since then that have fallen short. So I think hesitation may be warranted.

bfieidhbrjr 6y ago

It's a reputational thing. We call on the great and the good because they usually have no skin in the game, so they're impartial. They have a reputation to uphold so they'll do the right thing. It cuts through all the local politics and power that caused the problem. See Feynman and the solid rocket booster o rings in the 80's.

est31 6y ago
Yeah you can be the smartest person on earth, if nobody listens to you then your advice isn't helpful to society. Not your fault, to be clear, it's society's fault, but that doesn't change anything about the helpfulness. A lot of people give a lot of proposals for how something should be done. What will tell you that the proposal is good? Especially if you are a politician who isn't educated in computer science.
- usrusr 6y ago
  Also compromises. Exceptional status enables pulling through with uncompromising solutions that would be wildly impossible without that status. Unfortunately, some problems are solved much better with heavy compromises ("listening to every stakeholder"), other problems can only be solved well by an uncompromising solution. The meta-problem is telling one from the other ahead of time. I don't know if that's even possible.

joshspankit 6y ago

I’d argue that his perspectives on interconnected data are not only more deeply thought out for his continual thought on it over the past decades, but they are even more relevant today. I’d also say in a very real way that for reasons beyond his control, the WWW fell short of what Sir Berners-Lee envisioned, giving him the opportunity to start over and make sure it’s on the right course this time.

redwood 6y ago

The thing is, no one else would be able to get the NHS to pilot a platform like this... so while he may be a figurehead, his reputation makes it more conceivable that a next-generation privacy-oriented internet could get off the ground.

BillinghamJ 6y ago
The article says the NHS is already piloting it. There is a lot of appetite in government and the GDS-esque groups like NHSX to make significant improvements on these kinds of areas. Many of them have actually been a lot more successful than you'd think, in many very old departments.

Angostura 6y ago

For me though, the thing about TBL is he isn't a glory-hound, my sense of him is he gets involved in interesting problems that he thinks have serious benefits and gets stuck in. He's been thinking and working on this current problem for quite a while, takes it seriously and it is very close to the domain that he has been involved in for decades now. The name may generate some buzz, but I suspect the project may have intrinsic value in its own right.

usrusr 6y ago

I'm torn as well. Part of me is massively envious of a country being able to field TBL for its NHS. That's kind of like getting Banksy to design your birthday invitation cards because he happens to be your neighbor or something like that. Another part of me suspects that he might get seriously lost in overoptimism for some theoretically appealing but highly impractical idea that yields nothing in the end. Ironically, both those parts of me claim to be the one that majored in semantic web. (edit: punctuation for readability)

solarkraft 6y ago

I had a similar thought reading the headline. Is Tim Berners-Lee actually an exceptional guy with repeatable wisdom or just a cool guy who happened to stumble upon the idea of the web?