3 ms·

> To conclude, i think you're defining the semantic web differently than how Norvig is hahah. now why, why on earth would i use someone who clearly didnt/doesn

> To conclude, i think you're defining the semantic web differently than how Norvig is hahah. now why, why on earth would i use someone who clearly didnt/doesnt-get-it's limited conception? > feel that you are mis-stating my position. i dont feel like im being genuinely dealt with either. i felt like most of your points are fairly orthogonal interjections & i have been trying to return more to the article & my comments on them. the topic feels on going mis-stated to me & i am clarifying what we're actually discussing at the root, as i see it. > Ffs, melodramatic much? your words have felt dangerously misleading to me in a couple core places, forcing worse-is-better framings onto the scene repeatedly, & i do not think i am being melodramatic; what you are seeing is genuine alarm. i think i am being appropriately based. i do feel very strongly about this all, i feel like it is far to soon to be making conclusions & closing ourselves off to possibility. but i see fait accomplis written all over the outlooks i have given & it feels radically confining to me & very uncomfortable. im sorry i dont have a more clear promising inspiring case to rest my assertion on, that the old & new & ongoing reverberations of semantic web are mostly alike, represent an ongoing continual & vital thread of information. it's a long long voyage & it feels premature. i recommemd again to everyone my original points vis a vie whether Norvig has insight or not. if you are Google, maybe listen. everyone else, these three points Peter has made: my read is still that he never had a clue and/or was actively sabotaging a better web.

bawolff 5y ago
> hahah. now why, why on earth would i use someone who clearly didnt/doesnt-get-it's limited conception? Because we're discussing his argument. Traditionally its assumed when you discuss the validity of someone else's argument you take on their definitions for the purpose of discussing the argument (or argue something like: their argument is irrelavent because they define terms differently so it doesn't apply in the situation i care about). If your position is: "norvig is wrong when you take his words out of context to make them mean something different than what he meant" - all i can say is, yes obviously. Literally no-one disputes that. > your words have felt dangerously misleading to me in a couple core places, forcing worse-is-better framings onto the scene repeatedly If you mean my premise that not all people in the world (or to be less hyperbolic, a significant portion) have their incentives aligned with the semantic web, i would say: A) that's not what the term worse is better means in computers B) a core premise to an argument is not the same thing as framing. C) i'm not sure how you can say its misleading. I'm making a claim about the world. The generalized version (that getting humans to all agree on something is like hearding cats) is a fairly popular view point. Like all descriptive claims about the world, it could be true or it could be false. You haven't really provided any evidence or argument that its false. I don't understand what you think is misleading about it unless you think everyone who disagrees with you is being misleading. Edit: after rereading your post, and in an attempt to be fully fair - you might be referring to the premise that semantic networks need wide adoption before having value. I would still say that that's a premise not a framing. I only support the premise in the context that norvig was talking about originally - some sort of open membership highly distributed knowledge base useful for general search (what i would call the w3c semantic web "vision"). If you talk about semantic networks more generally, than this premise sometimes falls down, which seems to be where you're going with this argument. However i suspect that Norvig would also agree that semantic networks can potentially suceed in different contexts than the specific one he was talking about. I think most people agree with that statement. > but i see fait accomplis written all over the outlooks i have given & it feels radically confining to me & very uncomfortable. I don't know what to tell you. The world is an uncomfortable place and sometimes it sucks. Wishing for something doesn't make it so. The world is changed by people who recognize problems and figure out how to fix them or work around them. You clearly care about the semangic web - that person could be you! Those who simply ignore the inconvinent don't usually accomplish much. > what you are seeing is genuine alarm. With all due respect, if this relatively polite disagreement causes genuine alarm, i would strongly suggest avoiding twitter. > my read is still that he never had a clue and/or was actively sabotaging a better web. In some ways this is the most damning statement about the semantic web of all - if all it takes to kill a technology is for a google exec to be somewhat dismissive of it 20 years ago, then its clearly a pretty weak technology. Hell, google even provided a bunch of the initial funding for wikidata which is arguably one of the few success stories of semantic technologies. Which is not to say its isn't beautiful. I totally understand why people are enamoured with it. The idea is a wonderful dream; the pretty parts are very pretty. Alas a technology isn't only defined by the beautiful parts.
- rektide 5y ago
  > If your position is: "norvig is wrong when you take his words out of context to make them mean something different than what he meant" I believe I have had fully accurate context about Norvig's words. Let's walk through his words/my assertions a third time I guess. He called the world incompetent & said we'd never be able to do anything good, since we can't even do basic HTML. He's said second that competition would prevent cooperation/usefulness of the semantic web. Which is patently untrue then, as there was plenty of cooperation & ontologies can be mapped onto one another. And double patently untrue now that Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Yandex have a well adopted schema.org. Looking around at the world today, I'd say it turns out for tech that cooperation/interoperability has been one of the clearest ways to succeed. Microsoft having to make WSL or lose all (almost all) developers forever is a clear recent example. And he said that disinformation would overwhelm good information. Which seems like an idiotic premise, that we won't be able to peer review semantic web info. Especially given that semantic web's ideas of provenance & reputation are some of the most promising avenues we have to start making broader order of the chaos, starting to let cooperation happen. I have little sympathy at all for any of Peter's views. They all seem full of malice & looking only at bad intent. I can see that the Semantic Web might not help him & what he was up to, and maybe those words just never went said- that he was only using his own filter. But it looks to me like he outright never grasped the value of the semantic web, that it's took him utterly by surprise that projects like schema.org became integral offerings to Google & others, that he never saw possibility here. And for that, he seems like a fool, utterly mistaken in every concern, & a man without vision or sense of possibility. Nothing you've said makes it clear how I've missed the mark on my assessments. There are long long long words discussing wide varieties of outside manner but this core truth I continue to uphold, and I continue to not see what the clashes are to these rebuttals. Many pieces of outside context have been brought in, and some of them I've tried to talk through, but it's been quite the bombarbment of assertions & concerns & things stated as disagreements & refutations, but which we have not been well structured, which appear out of nowhere & are not well connected. For you to say that I am taking him out of context, that my assertions rest upon me making-up words for Peter, feels like a cruelty that I don't think is sound or reasonable right now. I have tried again and again to state clearly what I am arguing, to be clear about my rebuttals to Peter, and I don't think I'm putting words in his mouth in doing so. > If you mean my premise that not all people in the world (or to be less hyperbolic, a significant portion) have their incentives aligned with the semantic web, i would say: This ranks fairly low in my concerns & feelings of danger, but I do think that a determinism- a belief that anyone anywhere knows what the semantic web is for and how it's going to impact people- is indeed hopelessly prefixated. There is a required high level of uncertainty, given that we can only project & imagine what might be if more people had tried to make individual pieces of information speak for themselves, rather than confuse it all within an single page together. We don't know how the semantic web would or could empower authors or consumers, and we must respect that all manners of possibilities are out there which could have colossal incentives for any given party. To believe that we know, one way or another, is only our own held biases speaking. And that's not nearly enough for me. That, as it turns out, is fairly close to one of my core danger-senses When you say, "it could be true or it could be false," I again feel the grip of determinism- the desire to know one way or another, but I don't think that's how reality fundamentally works. I don't think we can ever find either answer for or against the Semantic Web conclusively, nor for plenty of existing technologies- there's endless debate about HTML and JavaScript, about their value/worth/danger. It will never be a solveable situation. > you might be referring to [my] premise that semantic networks need wide adoption before having value. I would still say that that's a premise not a framing. I simply believe in slow change. A decade for rebuilding the information architecture of society is not a long time, is too short a timescale to assess on. Ecological level change happens slowly, usually. Allowing better aspects to compound & grow is vital. The early pioneers & alpha geeks can begin to build outposts & settlements that build & build in value, that become commodified & expected. > I don't know what to tell you. The world is an uncomfortable place and sometimes it sucks. Wishing for something doesn't make it so. I'm very comfortable with uncertainty & uncomfort, and thank you very much but I do not require this ongoing sermonizing downtalking & abuse. My sense of danger comes from this above mentioned insistence on determinism, this quest to make a definitive answer when no clear definition is possible even for the tech that has been mass-adopted & popularized, much less the question of this speculative could-be technology. This view does not permit the uncertainty I think is necessary. My danger sense also ticks because at a number of junctures I've felt bombarded by words & issues & arguments that, to me, seem to spring up from nothing & not be connected to whatever I thought had been being discussed. Many of these injected elements seem to re-affirm the determinism views, seem to assert that we do know, that it is certain that the semantic web is False and Peter is True, and they are extra hard to try to un-wind a bit because they are simply asserted, without connection, without relation to what had been discussed. Views about who tech has to serve- the majority of users- are simply restated, again presenting this image that since the semantic web didn't succeed, it never could have, isn't a good fit. Premise or framing, they both accept a sealed fate, reject outright possibilities that maybe it could have been a great fit even then, could have revamped entirely how everyone interacted with information technology. This is a legit sense of danger, in overconfidence that lets us foolishly think we have Truth, that we know for sure what merits & what faults really lay here. > Those who simply ignore the inconvinent don't usually accomplish much. I will indeed try to consider Peters words but in my view, there are far more pressing & interesting places to invest in semantic web technology than in the useless complainings of Peter, which I find uninteresting & unhelpful & clearly off the mark. I'd note again that we're back to hammering on Peter = Truth; disagree/uncomfortable/dangerous. > With all due respect, if this relatively polite disagreement causes genuine alarm, It's because it rejects believing better paths are possible. I've tried to rebut Peter directly, but new concerns & assertions are made ongoingly & it's dizzying trying to follow the twists & turns, & there's little context for me to work with. I've felt very bombarded. And I've been facing what feels like a resolute belief in unsuitability whose only evidence is the sad, bad, crudy, disinformation plagued IT world that "won" that we have about us. I'm glad we have found at least a couple shared interests in talking about things like ActivityPub. But it has been extremely confusing trying to keep the discussion straight, to understand & handle the many many many points being raised against my, in my view, fairly straightforward rebutal of Peter's three arguments. > In some ways this is the most damning statement about the semantic web of all - if all it takes to kill a technology is for a google exec to be somewhat dismissive of it 20 years ago, then its clearly a pretty weak technology. It's not just Peter. Hating on the Semantic Web has been a major popular bandwagon for well over a decade now. This has warded off a significant amount of potential interest, has limited Semantic Web practitioners to a far narrower set of people than otherwise have considered, thought about, or worked upon semantic web systems. There have also been significant techno-social weaknesses. For a long time, semantic web technologies were largely proprietary, big tools. There were some ill-maintained JavaScript libraries, using obsolete web practices that didn't integrate well with modern webapp development. Both these stagnation points have both gotten much better in the past three years. In my view, semantic web is still failing to really assist users. I believe in a more Naked Object style paradigm, in trying to make computing more obvious, overt, clear, explanatory. Allowing the page to comprise itself of a number of resources, still, seems to be a clear as day direction to radically improve things, and Semantic Web technology has long offered just that, from a markup sense. But still the user experience is focused primarily on the high end, on power users, and this simple thought, of decomposing the page a bit, is only semi-sort of available in semantic web toolings we have today. Which is a realm few have any experience at all in, even though the tooling has gotten better, and the data has started to be more available.

bawolff 5y ago

> hahah. now why, why on earth would i use someone who clearly didnt/doesnt-get-it's limited conception? Because we're discussing his argument. Traditionally its assumed when you discuss the validity of someone else's argument you take on their definitions for the purpose of discussing the argument (or argue something like: their argument is irrelavent because they define terms differently so it doesn't apply in the situation i care about). If your position is: "norvig is wrong when you take his words out of context to make them mean something different than what he meant" - all i can say is, yes obviously. Literally no-one disputes that. > your words have felt dangerously misleading to me in a couple core places, forcing worse-is-better framings onto the scene repeatedly If you mean my premise that not all people in the world (or to be less hyperbolic, a significant portion) have their incentives aligned with the semantic web, i would say: A) that's not what the term worse is better means in computers B) a core premise to an argument is not the same thing as framing. C) i'm not sure how you can say its misleading. I'm making a claim about the world. The generalized version (that getting humans to all agree on something is like hearding cats) is a fairly popular view point. Like all descriptive claims about the world, it could be true or it could be false. You haven't really provided any evidence or argument that its false. I don't understand what you think is misleading about it unless you think everyone who disagrees with you is being misleading. Edit: after rereading your post, and in an attempt to be fully fair - you might be referring to the premise that semantic networks need wide adoption before having value. I would still say that that's a premise not a framing. I only support the premise in the context that norvig was talking about originally - some sort of open membership highly distributed knowledge base useful for general search (what i would call the w3c semantic web "vision"). If you talk about semantic networks more generally, than this premise sometimes falls down, which seems to be where you're going with this argument. However i suspect that Norvig would also agree that semantic networks can potentially suceed in different contexts than the specific one he was talking about. I think most people agree with that statement. > but i see fait accomplis written all over the outlooks i have given & it feels radically confining to me & very uncomfortable. I don't know what to tell you. The world is an uncomfortable place and sometimes it sucks. Wishing for something doesn't make it so. The world is changed by people who recognize problems and figure out how to fix them or work around them. You clearly care about the semangic web - that person could be you! Those who simply ignore the inconvinent don't usually accomplish much. > what you are seeing is genuine alarm. With all due respect, if this relatively polite disagreement causes genuine alarm, i would strongly suggest avoiding twitter. > my read is still that he never had a clue and/or was actively sabotaging a better web. In some ways this is the most damning statement about the semantic web of all - if all it takes to kill a technology is for a google exec to be somewhat dismissive of it 20 years ago, then its clearly a pretty weak technology. Hell, google even provided a bunch of the initial funding for wikidata which is arguably one of the few success stories of semantic technologies. Which is not to say its isn't beautiful. I totally understand why people are enamoured with it. The idea is a wonderful dream; the pretty parts are very pretty. Alas a technology isn't only defined by the beautiful parts.

rektide 5y ago
> If your position is: "norvig is wrong when you take his words out of context to make them mean something different than what he meant" I believe I have had fully accurate context about Norvig's words. Let's walk through his words/my assertions a third time I guess. He called the world incompetent & said we'd never be able to do anything good, since we can't even do basic HTML. He's said second that competition would prevent cooperation/usefulness of the semantic web. Which is patently untrue then, as there was plenty of cooperation & ontologies can be mapped onto one another. And double patently untrue now that Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Yandex have a well adopted schema.org. Looking around at the world today, I'd say it turns out for tech that cooperation/interoperability has been one of the clearest ways to succeed. Microsoft having to make WSL or lose all (almost all) developers forever is a clear recent example. And he said that disinformation would overwhelm good information. Which seems like an idiotic premise, that we won't be able to peer review semantic web info. Especially given that semantic web's ideas of provenance & reputation are some of the most promising avenues we have to start making broader order of the chaos, starting to let cooperation happen. I have little sympathy at all for any of Peter's views. They all seem full of malice & looking only at bad intent. I can see that the Semantic Web might not help him & what he was up to, and maybe those words just never went said- that he was only using his own filter. But it looks to me like he outright never grasped the value of the semantic web, that it's took him utterly by surprise that projects like schema.org became integral offerings to Google & others, that he never saw possibility here. And for that, he seems like a fool, utterly mistaken in every concern, & a man without vision or sense of possibility. Nothing you've said makes it clear how I've missed the mark on my assessments. There are long long long words discussing wide varieties of outside manner but this core truth I continue to uphold, and I continue to not see what the clashes are to these rebuttals. Many pieces of outside context have been brought in, and some of them I've tried to talk through, but it's been quite the bombarbment of assertions & concerns & things stated as disagreements & refutations, but which we have not been well structured, which appear out of nowhere & are not well connected. For you to say that I am taking him out of context, that my assertions rest upon me making-up words for Peter, feels like a cruelty that I don't think is sound or reasonable right now. I have tried again and again to state clearly what I am arguing, to be clear about my rebuttals to Peter, and I don't think I'm putting words in his mouth in doing so. > If you mean my premise that not all people in the world (or to be less hyperbolic, a significant portion) have their incentives aligned with the semantic web, i would say: This ranks fairly low in my concerns & feelings of danger, but I do think that a determinism- a belief that anyone anywhere knows what the semantic web is for and how it's going to impact people- is indeed hopelessly prefixated. There is a required high level of uncertainty, given that we can only project & imagine what might be if more people had tried to make individual pieces of information speak for themselves, rather than confuse it all within an single page together. We don't know how the semantic web would or could empower authors or consumers, and we must respect that all manners of possibilities are out there which could have colossal incentives for any given party. To believe that we know, one way or another, is only our own held biases speaking. And that's not nearly enough for me. That, as it turns out, is fairly close to one of my core danger-senses When you say, "it could be true or it could be false," I again feel the grip of determinism- the desire to know one way or another, but I don't think that's how reality fundamentally works. I don't think we can ever find either answer for or against the Semantic Web conclusively, nor for plenty of existing technologies- there's endless debate about HTML and JavaScript, about their value/worth/danger. It will never be a solveable situation. > you might be referring to [my] premise that semantic networks need wide adoption before having value. I would still say that that's a premise not a framing. I simply believe in slow change. A decade for rebuilding the information architecture of society is not a long time, is too short a timescale to assess on. Ecological level change happens slowly, usually. Allowing better aspects to compound & grow is vital. The early pioneers & alpha geeks can begin to build outposts & settlements that build & build in value, that become commodified & expected. > I don't know what to tell you. The world is an uncomfortable place and sometimes it sucks. Wishing for something doesn't make it so. I'm very comfortable with uncertainty & uncomfort, and thank you very much but I do not require this ongoing sermonizing downtalking & abuse. My sense of danger comes from this above mentioned insistence on determinism, this quest to make a definitive answer when no clear definition is possible even for the tech that has been mass-adopted & popularized, much less the question of this speculative could-be technology. This view does not permit the uncertainty I think is necessary. My danger sense also ticks because at a number of junctures I've felt bombarded by words & issues & arguments that, to me, seem to spring up from nothing & not be connected to whatever I thought had been being discussed. Many of these injected elements seem to re-affirm the determinism views, seem to assert that we do know, that it is certain that the semantic web is False and Peter is True, and they are extra hard to try to un-wind a bit because they are simply asserted, without connection, without relation to what had been discussed. Views about who tech has to serve- the majority of users- are simply restated, again presenting this image that since the semantic web didn't succeed, it never could have, isn't a good fit. Premise or framing, they both accept a sealed fate, reject outright possibilities that maybe it could have been a great fit even then, could have revamped entirely how everyone interacted with information technology. This is a legit sense of danger, in overconfidence that lets us foolishly think we have Truth, that we know for sure what merits & what faults really lay here. > Those who simply ignore the inconvinent don't usually accomplish much. I will indeed try to consider Peters words but in my view, there are far more pressing & interesting places to invest in semantic web technology than in the useless complainings of Peter, which I find uninteresting & unhelpful & clearly off the mark. I'd note again that we're back to hammering on Peter = Truth; disagree/uncomfortable/dangerous. > With all due respect, if this relatively polite disagreement causes genuine alarm, It's because it rejects believing better paths are possible. I've tried to rebut Peter directly, but new concerns & assertions are made ongoingly & it's dizzying trying to follow the twists & turns, & there's little context for me to work with. I've felt very bombarded. And I've been facing what feels like a resolute belief in unsuitability whose only evidence is the sad, bad, crudy, disinformation plagued IT world that "won" that we have about us. I'm glad we have found at least a couple shared interests in talking about things like ActivityPub. But it has been extremely confusing trying to keep the discussion straight, to understand & handle the many many many points being raised against my, in my view, fairly straightforward rebutal of Peter's three arguments. > In some ways this is the most damning statement about the semantic web of all - if all it takes to kill a technology is for a google exec to be somewhat dismissive of it 20 years ago, then its clearly a pretty weak technology. It's not just Peter. Hating on the Semantic Web has been a major popular bandwagon for well over a decade now. This has warded off a significant amount of potential interest, has limited Semantic Web practitioners to a far narrower set of people than otherwise have considered, thought about, or worked upon semantic web systems. There have also been significant techno-social weaknesses. For a long time, semantic web technologies were largely proprietary, big tools. There were some ill-maintained JavaScript libraries, using obsolete web practices that didn't integrate well with modern webapp development. Both these stagnation points have both gotten much better in the past three years. In my view, semantic web is still failing to really assist users. I believe in a more Naked Object style paradigm, in trying to make computing more obvious, overt, clear, explanatory. Allowing the page to comprise itself of a number of resources, still, seems to be a clear as day direction to radically improve things, and Semantic Web technology has long offered just that, from a markup sense. But still the user experience is focused primarily on the high end, on power users, and this simple thought, of decomposing the page a bit, is only semi-sort of available in semantic web toolings we have today. Which is a realm few have any experience at all in, even though the tooling has gotten better, and the data has started to be more available.