SA: "I have the vision that research communities'
crowd intelligence could be employed in the Web 2.0 style for deciding
about research funding".
MB: "...we see people can vote
resources....Allowing people to add ontology-based annotations is just
similar and would be another step forward."
JC: "Google scholar
provides citation counts, which while still a fairly rough measure,
does include an idea of the importance of any piece of
work."
PDeL: "I agree with the value of the wisdom of the crowd
effect in many cases, however it should be controlled somehow to
prevent the emergence of "foolishness of the crowd".
MP: "We
second the idea of common standard ontologies for the semantic web
use.."
These points are all the significant sides and
aspects of one problem, (Academic) Research Illusion: "deluding by
creating illusory ideas", "considered scientific (magical) by laymen
(naive observers)", " something what is false", "erroneous mental
representation".
I incline to think that the "crowd
intelligence" or "foolishness of the crowd" may explain the nature of
the "phenomenon", and a canonic world model encoded as a
machine-understandable common ontology standards of meanings may allow
to head off it at all.
To my knowledge, there are no semantic
applications on Intelligence and Collective Intelligence or Stupidity
and Crowd Stupidity, what must be a big miss. Some public ventilation
of these really critical issues could be of use, theoretical and
practical.
Interestingly, while googling "Intelligence" (the
power to perceive, learn, image, remember, understand, reason and
think, will, or communicate), one gets 130 m hits, while looking for
"Stupidity" (lack of intelligence, mentally limited, dumbness,
ignorance, an absence of ideas), just 12,2 m hits. There was an
economic historian Carlo Cipolla, who tried to formulate the
fundamental laws of stupidity. One of them: A person is stupid if he
causes damage to another person or group of people without
experiencing personal gain, or even worse causing damage to themselves
in the process. Accordingly, he distinguished four groups of
people:
1.. Intelligent people (bringing benefits to themselves
and others, generating news values and assets);
2.. Naive or
Helpless people (bringing benefits to others and losses to themselves,
enriching the few);
3.. Criminals or Bandits (just redistributing
the assets);
4.. Stupid people (causing losses to themselves and
society at large, destroying the assets).
Its is plain that of all
sorts of stupidity, the most dangerous is the one coming from learned
professionals, so there to put the academic research head gamers is an
open question.
Community-based knowledge forums as Wikipedia
are increasingly represented as collective intelligence (WikiMind
symbiotic intelligence) projects. Apropos, other legacy examples of
collective intelligence (or stupidity?) are political parties (for
nation-wide political stupidity or global political dullness are
sitting here).
The Group Intelligence (group mind, collective
intelligence, crowd wisdom) implies collectively solving complex
problems by means of networked ICT (as the Internet and Web) resulting
in enhancing individual minds and self-identity. Or, technically, it
is about a global virtual collaboration of individual minds guided by
standard ontological world models and semantic technologies as well as
by peering, sharing, objectivity and professional knowledge.
By
contrast, Group Stupidity suggests all sort of costly academic
research illusions at the cost of degrading individual minds and
losing self-identity, technically aggravated by numerous separate
ontologies and views and disjoint applications.
Azamat
Abdoullaev
http://www.eis.com.cyPS: As a side
note, propose to establish ASA, Academic Stupidity Awards (with
categories in each knowledge domain, the stupidest idea, the stupidest
article, the stupidest research project, the stupidest academician;
for political correctness to use "unintelligent" instead of "stupid").
And please don't mix it with Ig Noble prizes,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ig_Noble, having some
sense. The existent World Stupidity Awards will then become just a
funny joke.
----- Original Message ----- From: "Sören Auer"
<
auer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To:
"Jeremy Carroll" <
jeremy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Cc: "'Azamat'" <
abdoul@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>; "'[ontolog-forum] '"
<
ontolog-forum@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>;
"'SW-forum'" <
semantic-web@xxxxxx>; <
mjarrar@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Friday, May 08,
2009 11:04 PM
Subject: Re: Research Illusion
Jeremy
Carroll wrote:
> Google scholar provides citation counts, which
while still a
> fairly rough measure, does include an idea of
the importance
> of any piece of work.
I agree that
citation counts are a pretty good estimate of a works impact.
A
more severe problem from my point of view is the distribution
of
research funds.
Existing paradigms seem to be either
biased towards large established
organizations or well-connected,
long established individuals. For
innovative ideas and younger
researchers it is much harder.
I have the vision that research
communities' crowd intelligence could be
employed in the Web 2.0
style for deciding about research funding
[1].
--Sören
[1]
http://wiki.cofundos.org/