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Popper would turn in his grave: > - The creator of shirky.com lives in Brooklyn > - People who live in Brooklyn speak with a Brooklyn accent > You could conc

Popper would turn in his grave: > - The creator of shirky.com lives in Brooklyn > - People who live in Brooklyn speak with a Brooklyn accent > You could conclude from this pair of assertions that the creator of shirky.com pronounces it "shoiky.com." If you use faulty assumptions, you can conclude a lot. Universal reasoning really doesn't swing that well with reality, is what we can conclude.

arp242 6y ago
Have you actually read the article? Because it continues with: "You could conclude from this pair of assertions that the creator of shirky.com pronounces it "shoiky.com." This, unlike assertions about my physical location, is false. It would be easy to shrug this error off as Garbage In, Garbage Out, but it isn't so simple. The creator of shirky.com does live in Brooklyn, and some people who live in Brooklyn do speak with a Brooklyn accent, just not all of them (us)." "Each of those statements is true, in other words, but each is true in a different way. It is tempting to note that the second statement is a generalization that can only be understood in context, but that way madness lies. Any requirement that a given statement be cross-checked against a library of context-giving statements, which would have still further context, would doom the system to death by scale." And it continues a bit more about generalities. You can agree or disagree with that take, but your comment makes it sound like the author used this dodgy reasoning, which only appears like that because you lifted a very narrow part of the article and removed the context. It's an extremely unfair characterisation you're making here. You can make almost any article look bad by this.
- madsbuch 6y ago
  I stand corrected, in particular that my formulation is unfair to the author. However, in a formal framework of pure deduction we have no moderation of truth. Either a sentence is true or it is not (or it is non-deducible). The sentence `some people who live in Brooklyn do speak with a Brooklyn accent` is not coercible to `People who live in Brooklyn speak with a Brooklyn accent`. I follow his argument that a syllogistic world view is not practical in a distributed, collaborative semantic web sense. But this is kind of far away from his statement: "Syllogisms are Not Very Useful".

arp242 6y ago

Have you actually read the article? Because it continues with: "You could conclude from this pair of assertions that the creator of shirky.com pronounces it "shoiky.com." This, unlike assertions about my physical location, is false. It would be easy to shrug this error off as Garbage In, Garbage Out, but it isn't so simple. The creator of shirky.com does live in Brooklyn, and some people who live in Brooklyn do speak with a Brooklyn accent, just not all of them (us)." "Each of those statements is true, in other words, but each is true in a different way. It is tempting to note that the second statement is a generalization that can only be understood in context, but that way madness lies. Any requirement that a given statement be cross-checked against a library of context-giving statements, which would have still further context, would doom the system to death by scale." And it continues a bit more about generalities. You can agree or disagree with that take, but your comment makes it sound like the author used this dodgy reasoning, which only appears like that because you lifted a very narrow part of the article and removed the context. It's an extremely unfair characterisation you're making here. You can make almost any article look bad by this.

madsbuch 6y ago
I stand corrected, in particular that my formulation is unfair to the author. However, in a formal framework of pure deduction we have no moderation of truth. Either a sentence is true or it is not (or it is non-deducible). The sentence `some people who live in Brooklyn do speak with a Brooklyn accent` is not coercible to `People who live in Brooklyn speak with a Brooklyn accent`. I follow his argument that a syllogistic world view is not practical in a distributed, collaborative semantic web sense. But this is kind of far away from his statement: "Syllogisms are Not Very Useful".