Thanks for continuing this thread - you really captured my intent better than I originally expressed

I have to say its been a bit disconcerting to learn this week that quite a few CS folks I have talked with accept Anderson’s formulation, to some degree. What’s scary here is that this is precisely how we relinquish control to the machines - if we give up our agency, I suppose we’ll get what we deserve.

While I’ve had some success swaying perspectives in conversations (some of this philosophy stuff is actually quite practical), the tougher argument to develop is that there “is no experimental method that is purely inductive, not even neural networks.” These implicit forms of knowledge representation are so counter-intuitive, that we don’t really know how to think about them yet.

I think its possible (and important) to tease out the specific intentional choices that go into deciding how and what to count, as you have done with the PageRank algorithm here.

This was another example I came across a few months ago that struck me as problematic in similar ways:
Crowded Wisdom.

We had better pre-empt this quickly, before “they” decide to feed their behavioural auto-classification systems the schemes in the DSM …

cheers.

Bernhard Rieder points to an interesting interview about a not so surprising recommendation technology rolled out by Digg. The recommendations engine compares a user’s ‘digging’ of stories to the digging of others, while stories are b…

True, SearchMonkey is interesting and handy (played around with it a little bit some time ago) but it really doesn’t go that much further than the old Google SOAP API (I don’t think they ever went REST, no?) in the sense that you cannot bypass the company’s ranking. These services just allow for application level access to the normal search interface. The SearchMonkey overview states:

“SearchMonkey does NOT enable you to reorder results on a search page. You can use SearchMonkey to change your search result display so that they are more attractive and useful, but SearchMonkey does not change algorithmic rankings.”

Sure, you can use AND NOT operators to exclude certain terms or rerank results (I used that in a tool I built for my thesis) but you cannot directly access the index of crawled sites without passing through a ranking layer. What would be an interesting compromise though would be to have access to thousands or tens of thousands of results with one API call (through REST or SOAP or whatever) so you could do some serious reranking. But neither Yahoo nor Google allow that :-(.

For the Google Sandbox I have in mind, you’d have to run code on Google’s servers and that’s why I find the App platform interesting. But sure, currently it’s definitely not about opening up search. Just wishful thinking…

That’s very much true - I think that there is a common idea behind IEML and Esperanto but there are also some pronounced differences: IEML is computer processable, meaning that the language is schematic enough to allow reasoning by algorithm. This is especially interesting for searching and other automated forms of semantic processing (clustering, filtering, etc.). In a sense, IEML is seated in the middle of a triangle formed by symbolic logic, a generalistic philosophical ontology and Esperanto…

You might be surprised to learn that Esperanto has an extensive, lively indigenous culture and an original literature to rival that of many ethnic tongues. Naturally it didn’t start out that way, but when you have such a large community speaking a common language for such a long time, it’s probably inevitable that culture will emerge. People around the world use Esperanto every day for everything from childrearing to religious worship to technical manuals to science (I am a subscriber to Scirenca Revuo) to erotica.

Take a look at http://www.esperanto.net