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Imagine if research was like github, but deduplicated : a giant graph database of unique facts, hypothesis, assumptions, proofs and experiment results, where an
by antpls 6y ago
Imagine if research was like github, but deduplicated : a giant graph database of unique facts, hypothesis, assumptions, proofs and experiment results, where anyone can contribute, from fixing a typo to publishing experiment dataset.
You would reference to previous knowledge without having to think about citing authors, because it would be automatically generated from the graph.
Then we would have hundreds of "knowledge verifiers", like we have bots scanning github, and ultimately bots deriving new knowledge and contributing to the graph.
The whole world would be building a shared database of knowledge, without any duplicated effort.
Most of the individual facts in this database would probably be boring (like the trivial facts in logic or mathematic), but once in a while, an interesting and important fact would be found.
- refulgentis 6y agoSo, Wikipedia, except with some sort of syntactical structure that allowed for formal evaluation and analysis of arguments...we could call it a "compiler" for "compiling" sets of rules, or "libraries"
- bongoman37 6y agoThis is an interesting idea and would work for something like Math or maybe theoretical physics, but once you get to messier fields like Biology it would be mired in hopeless confusion. Every experiment has so many varied parameters and restrictions due to things like ethics committees that standardizing it is nigh impossible. This is not even going down to fields like psychology.