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I'm not sure what you are trying to contribute to the discussion with this abstract, high minded generalization? I need to return to what I said the sentence be

I'm not sure what you are trying to contribute to the discussion with this abstract, high minded generalization? I need to return to what I said the sentence before, for some context about what we're actually trying to debate, I think? > What concerns me most though is that Norvig seems to be arguing a strong case of worse-is-better, claiming that since some people will find semantic web difficult to publish, it's not worth doing at all. I continue to believe this & don't see how it's challenged. It doesn't matter at all if not everyone does the semantic web. I continue to think Norvig is making us wade out of a swamp of irrelevant disbelief that has no bearing on what use there is. It's insisting on an absolutist framing when we can have ongoing, continual gain & wins from some folk trying to do better. It's hard to move past because it's hard to debate irrelevant sticky points. Norvig's point was entirely a non-issue, and finding that meta-analysis to explain that is harder than having a point that actually means something that we can then discuss straightforwardly. This objection Norvig raised is irreelvant & nonsensical. It was actively harmful to suggest everyone has to be onboard and everyone has to do a thing 100% right for a thing to be ok.

bawolff 5y ago
Ah ok, i thought you were generalizing that to all his points (incompetence and malice) not just the adoption one. I do think his adoption criticism is by far his weakest argument, but i am still convinced by it. That said, I think there's a lot of missing elaboration for the argument. My reading of it is: * users want web crawling tools that work for the majority of the web * most authors will find semantic web too complex to implent (Say > 95% don't implement) * as a result, if we want to serve our users, we would need to make two tools,one for semantic sites and one for not * The non-semantic tool is going to work for both semantic and non semantic sites, so why bother building two tools? To reiterate my previous comment - this is a bog standard product problem. Its so common it even has a name: chicken-or-the-egg. Tons of products require some sort of critical mass or network effects to be useful. Succesful products find a way to get there or make the product somewhat useful before that point so incentives are such that there is a path to get from 0 to a stable sustaining point. > It's hard to move past because it's hard to debate irrelevant sticky points. Norvig's point was entirely a non-issue, and finding that meta-analysis to explain that is harder than having a point that actually means something that we can then discuss straightforwardly. If you really believe lack of adoption is a non issue, then i'm not sure why you think you have to move past this. Success is the best come-back to criticism, and if the lack of adoption is a non-issue, why are we debating whether or not its an issue instead of just pointing to the successes? And to be fair, there have been successes in specific limited domains. Domain-specific successes just aren't the grand idealistic vision of a unified semantic web that people like to present. I suspect that its this grand ideal that Norvig is arguing against, not against niche specific publishing of structured data.
- rektide 5y ago
  > "users want web crawling tools that work for the majority of the web" again the overriding belief that the lowest common denominator is the only function worth serving. again refusing the challenge of doing better outright, & opting into only believing in worse. you've started off by excluding all use cases except the worst one. and you just made that up with no evidence. we'd need to have a better web already built & rolled out to know this, to a/b test. maybe if we had gone down the semantic web paths harder we'd have really good parameterizable search that totally changed everything, became a core workflow for literally everyone. maybe maybe social media never turned into a toxic cesspool because we emerged web of trust systems, and social democracy flourished world-wide via the web. maybe we built a better more decrntralized web that got people information some better way. you've started with the view that what we have now is optimal & that serving the lowest user is the only goal, but we don't know what other kinds of success might have looked like; we don't even know how this specific limited end you've imposed might be served. > "most authors will find semantic web too complex to implent (Say > 95% don't implement)" again just assuming worse is the only real option. assuming incompetence, like Peter. https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/structured-data/intro-structured-data#search-appearance https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/structure... here's google's docs for how to implement semantic web today. i'm pretty sure most of the lower quartile of developers i've worked with (still not a terrible lot) could get something ok going on an existing project in half a day, based on this. peter just said the world was "incompetent" & basically left it at that. this argument feels like a slightly less harsh re-assertion of that; again, i disagree. > "as a result, if we want to serve our users, we would need to make two tools,one for semantic sites and one for not" i understand nothing about how we lept here. even assuming i was sympathetic to either of your first points, i see no advantage or benefit from this. it makes me quake. it's anti-participatory- it believes there is some web today which must be conseved as it is, never grown further. it proposes any changes in use must fork off & start their own separate sphere of community, use. this sounds godforsaken awful & ruinous. not only is worse better but it must be prrserved so against the better. this is a stunning conclusion which i am still working to recover from, and wholly contradictory to both Postel's Law, and to the malleability of the medium which has, imo, made it the most competent & powerful shared medium we have on the planet. > chicken-or-the-egg" i think this is a chicken & egg problem too, sort of, in that both must arise & it's not clear how exactly it gets started. but like the real chicken & egg, in truth there are only many many small microshifts, adjustments, small evolutions, allowed diversification & many different flourishings that can then arise. i see no reason the extensible powerful web & the extensible powerful user agent should do as you say & split. we obviously clearly should enrich, should make the web that is semantic, so the chicken can become more chicken like, and better tools, so the egg can become more egglike. we sacrifice nothing by working for better. we can make our information better, easily, at little cost to us & none to the lower users, & we can over time find & create a wide range of tools that dont just search, but which generally improve the user experience, in a range of ways. when pages take the step of marking up their contents in machine readable ways, we enable more possibilities, more diversification, more possible flourishing. > if you really believe lack of adoption is a non issue, again i think there's some very abstract words that again miss the topic of conversation. a reminder, i was talking to this: >> "We deal with millions of Web masters who can't configure a server, can't write HTML" i do believe in a far wider range of adoptability than picking up the lens of the narrowest view. picking up the crudest typecast of bad operators one can reach for, & using that to browbeat those who want to try better, more advanced, is what i described as a low bog. peter called the world "incompetent", as his opening salvo, and i think that's just incredibly small & not worth giving an ounce of time or energy. whatever truth there are to peter's views, the world ought try to be better. a better hypermedia is more likely to, in the long run, breed better hypermediaists. a view that we're bad is likely to breed less. > instead of just pointing to the successes? ok so this time you're willing to possibly entertain my notion- not assuming everyone is incompetent & goning to be unable to manage it- great- and now we're going to evaluate semantic web by what successes we have today to our name. i do think there are some great user tools/extensions for seeing the semantic web about them as they go about. but mostly i think there's a whole range of ehat the web could be that's been bypassed, ignored, by cant-do worse-is-betterism trash talking. the semantic web we have now is some islands of json-ld not so much marking up the web, making it semantic, but providing m2m hooks for search engines. there are still some successes. some cool tools to see embedded data, to make better breadcrumbs of where we go. activitypub is showing the value of extensible, interlinked structured data, is a hotbed of neat social systems & apps & decentralizations. the js libraries have only recently got good, got modern, but they have; that's a subtle but promising sign to me, a form of success. but mostly disbelief & scorn has carried the day against the semantic web, kept it from accruing even the slow-burning background interest i think it deserves. mostly we havent been incrementally growing, making small advances. more energy is spent telling pop culture that semantic web is dead than there is time or words spent exploring what might be or what would be possible. personally, measuring success under these conditions of not just neglect but hostility seems like yet another convenient way to refuse the call, to deny the real exploration & engagement with what could be or what we could improve on. we can keep at setting up hurdles for the semantic web to jump over for you & Peter's pleasure, but none of these topics, these trials, i think, have much value for a hungry or open mind, one seeming to go further.

bawolff 5y ago

Ah ok, i thought you were generalizing that to all his points (incompetence and malice) not just the adoption one. I do think his adoption criticism is by far his weakest argument, but i am still convinced by it. That said, I think there's a lot of missing elaboration for the argument. My reading of it is: * users want web crawling tools that work for the majority of the web * most authors will find semantic web too complex to implent (Say > 95% don't implement) * as a result, if we want to serve our users, we would need to make two tools,one for semantic sites and one for not * The non-semantic tool is going to work for both semantic and non semantic sites, so why bother building two tools? To reiterate my previous comment - this is a bog standard product problem. Its so common it even has a name: chicken-or-the-egg. Tons of products require some sort of critical mass or network effects to be useful. Succesful products find a way to get there or make the product somewhat useful before that point so incentives are such that there is a path to get from 0 to a stable sustaining point. > It's hard to move past because it's hard to debate irrelevant sticky points. Norvig's point was entirely a non-issue, and finding that meta-analysis to explain that is harder than having a point that actually means something that we can then discuss straightforwardly. If you really believe lack of adoption is a non issue, then i'm not sure why you think you have to move past this. Success is the best come-back to criticism, and if the lack of adoption is a non-issue, why are we debating whether or not its an issue instead of just pointing to the successes? And to be fair, there have been successes in specific limited domains. Domain-specific successes just aren't the grand idealistic vision of a unified semantic web that people like to present. I suspect that its this grand ideal that Norvig is arguing against, not against niche specific publishing of structured data.

rektide 5y ago
> "users want web crawling tools that work for the majority of the web" again the overriding belief that the lowest common denominator is the only function worth serving. again refusing the challenge of doing better outright, & opting into only believing in worse. you've started off by excluding all use cases except the worst one. and you just made that up with no evidence. we'd need to have a better web already built & rolled out to know this, to a/b test. maybe if we had gone down the semantic web paths harder we'd have really good parameterizable search that totally changed everything, became a core workflow for literally everyone. maybe maybe social media never turned into a toxic cesspool because we emerged web of trust systems, and social democracy flourished world-wide via the web. maybe we built a better more decrntralized web that got people information some better way. you've started with the view that what we have now is optimal & that serving the lowest user is the only goal, but we don't know what other kinds of success might have looked like; we don't even know how this specific limited end you've imposed might be served. > "most authors will find semantic web too complex to implent (Say > 95% don't implement)" again just assuming worse is the only real option. assuming incompetence, like Peter. https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/structured-data/intro-structured-data#search-appearance https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/structure... here's google's docs for how to implement semantic web today. i'm pretty sure most of the lower quartile of developers i've worked with (still not a terrible lot) could get something ok going on an existing project in half a day, based on this. peter just said the world was "incompetent" & basically left it at that. this argument feels like a slightly less harsh re-assertion of that; again, i disagree. > "as a result, if we want to serve our users, we would need to make two tools,one for semantic sites and one for not" i understand nothing about how we lept here. even assuming i was sympathetic to either of your first points, i see no advantage or benefit from this. it makes me quake. it's anti-participatory- it believes there is some web today which must be conseved as it is, never grown further. it proposes any changes in use must fork off & start their own separate sphere of community, use. this sounds godforsaken awful & ruinous. not only is worse better but it must be prrserved so against the better. this is a stunning conclusion which i am still working to recover from, and wholly contradictory to both Postel's Law, and to the malleability of the medium which has, imo, made it the most competent & powerful shared medium we have on the planet. > chicken-or-the-egg" i think this is a chicken & egg problem too, sort of, in that both must arise & it's not clear how exactly it gets started. but like the real chicken & egg, in truth there are only many many small microshifts, adjustments, small evolutions, allowed diversification & many different flourishings that can then arise. i see no reason the extensible powerful web & the extensible powerful user agent should do as you say & split. we obviously clearly should enrich, should make the web that is semantic, so the chicken can become more chicken like, and better tools, so the egg can become more egglike. we sacrifice nothing by working for better. we can make our information better, easily, at little cost to us & none to the lower users, & we can over time find & create a wide range of tools that dont just search, but which generally improve the user experience, in a range of ways. when pages take the step of marking up their contents in machine readable ways, we enable more possibilities, more diversification, more possible flourishing. > if you really believe lack of adoption is a non issue, again i think there's some very abstract words that again miss the topic of conversation. a reminder, i was talking to this: >> "We deal with millions of Web masters who can't configure a server, can't write HTML" i do believe in a far wider range of adoptability than picking up the lens of the narrowest view. picking up the crudest typecast of bad operators one can reach for, & using that to browbeat those who want to try better, more advanced, is what i described as a low bog. peter called the world "incompetent", as his opening salvo, and i think that's just incredibly small & not worth giving an ounce of time or energy. whatever truth there are to peter's views, the world ought try to be better. a better hypermedia is more likely to, in the long run, breed better hypermediaists. a view that we're bad is likely to breed less. > instead of just pointing to the successes? ok so this time you're willing to possibly entertain my notion- not assuming everyone is incompetent & goning to be unable to manage it- great- and now we're going to evaluate semantic web by what successes we have today to our name. i do think there are some great user tools/extensions for seeing the semantic web about them as they go about. but mostly i think there's a whole range of ehat the web could be that's been bypassed, ignored, by cant-do worse-is-betterism trash talking. the semantic web we have now is some islands of json-ld not so much marking up the web, making it semantic, but providing m2m hooks for search engines. there are still some successes. some cool tools to see embedded data, to make better breadcrumbs of where we go. activitypub is showing the value of extensible, interlinked structured data, is a hotbed of neat social systems & apps & decentralizations. the js libraries have only recently got good, got modern, but they have; that's a subtle but promising sign to me, a form of success. but mostly disbelief & scorn has carried the day against the semantic web, kept it from accruing even the slow-burning background interest i think it deserves. mostly we havent been incrementally growing, making small advances. more energy is spent telling pop culture that semantic web is dead than there is time or words spent exploring what might be or what would be possible. personally, measuring success under these conditions of not just neglect but hostility seems like yet another convenient way to refuse the call, to deny the real exploration & engagement with what could be or what we could improve on. we can keep at setting up hurdles for the semantic web to jump over for you & Peter's pleasure, but none of these topics, these trials, i think, have much value for a hungry or open mind, one seeming to go further.