Insight versus Answers
May 14, 2003
There's a discussion going on at the Blue Oxen Collaboratory that started out with BillSeitz wondering if mashed together wiki words were the best presentation. (0000OB)
The conversation has since wandered in some interesting directions. one of my contributions inquires about the importance of new insight compared to the value of retrieving answers to known questions. (0000OC)
This division seem to be central to many discussions about the Semantic Web, Artificial Intelligence, Knowledge Representation, and relations. (0000OD)
My basic conclusion is that it takes many kinds to make the world go round but the message makes it obvious where my bias lies. (0000OE)
The entire thread is very interesting. Check it out. (0000OF)
Sending...
Comments
I don't know a damn thing about WikiWords, but some of the discussion in the thread pertains closely to something I've been mulling over lately, in various contexts -- in particular, the essential tension between: (0000QS)
- developing a shared private referential network, which usually involves shortcuts and in-jokes (and promoting group cohesion, to the point that it often plays a pretty big role in, say, falling in love) (0000QT)
and, on the other hand, (0000QU)
- the vital exercise of expressing your ideas _without_ resorting to a private language. (Private language at its worst leads to a kind of self-congratulatory mental laziness, like the inventory of not particularly original named concepts that underlie most pop business or self-help books). (0000QV)
Of course shorthands and special vocabularies can help encourage shared understanding. But I also think that if your goal is to connect disparate ideas, you need a constant review of what you're talking about _outside_ of the context of your own last breakthrough, so that you can hop around on various levels of abstraction, zooming in and out. And I think that to do this effectively, you have to keep moving away from your own private language, even as it develops. (0000QW)
I don't think I'm explaining this very well. It's only incidentally about being able to explain anything to other people. Rather, it's about incessantly checking your new ideas in with everything else you (singular or plural) already know. (0000QX)
To quote the statistician Neil Ullman: "To all things we serve as a customer -- in some ways merely as a customer of our own actions." I think we also have to act as customers of our own insights -- whether we're working as a group of people or as a group of "agents" in a single human noggin. (0000QY)
And I should point out that whether you're consciously focussed on developing an idea or on articulating it, parenthetical context tends to be the stumbling block. It's blisteringly hard to keep digressions general enough so you don't lose focus, but specific enough to be useful. It's a difficult thinking problem; serving with your favo(u)rite hypertextual sauce can only take you so far. (0000QZ)