Re: [ontolog-forum] memory loss

[Paola Di Maio <paola.dimaio@xxxxxxxxx>]

Ravi
as humans, we err, and as societies, we err in corresponding orders of magnitude
(there is an opposing argument to collective intelligence, which is collective stupidity)

I am always surprised what humanity has managed to achieve (the actual), especially when we compare it to what we manage
not to achieve (the potential). Amazing to see how far we got, given the inherent limitations of our human nature

We need to work with what we've got (constraint) that includes human/society/organisational ignorance/congitive/psychological constraints of some fact at any given time.

For every Darwin who became known to history, there may be hundreds of others who 
may have disappeared without trace of what they knew, what they discovered, what they said. Others who may have been
imprisoned, hanged, burned, crucified, spat at, marginalized, ridiculed. Had Darwin come out with his theory at the time of Galileo, or before Henry VXXX had given the two fingers to Rome, would science be what it is today?

The web (okay, and Google)  is changing everything, including allowing this discussion, enabling us to make exponential progress in all areas of knowledge (cetainly in my case). For that alone,  I am perfectly happy and grateful.

From here onwards we ll just have to work things out on a daily basis. See what sticks....

P

On Sun, Oct 11, 2009 at 6:23 PM, ravi sharma <drravisharma@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Paola

It is very difficult for people including me to try and shed off preconceived notions and culturally indoctrinated beliefs. However, humanity has and could have progressed more if we could shed off this, accept people even when they say somethings are more ancient than Greece, or Greeks' communications to the rest of the west. Also what we wonders we could do if we used collective but reasoned wisdom, rather than filter out many things useful from our own view of the world.

Science is one and reasoning or logic another of few areas that allow to say, when I am gone and till other facts are found, --- is this idea or theory or understanding that I am presenting likely to survive, just as we study Darwin and other Rishis' or Mathematicians' works even centuries after they are gone?
Regards.
--
Thanks.
Ravi
(Dr. Ravi Sharma)
313 204 1740 Mobile

On Sat, Oct 10, 2009 at 2:49 PM, Paola Di Maio <paola.dimaio@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

John
let me pick on one more important thing you say

My major complaint is that the people who developed the SemWeb
ignored the 50 years of R & D on that and many other subjects.

From what I observe, this is also a widespread phenomenon in many fields
amd its the result of how the 'scientific community'  has evolved (reference to the article posted earlier on research cartels)

In modern knowledge management, we refer to a pathology called ' organisational amnesia', indicating the knowledge that escapes when
experts move on

In modern sciences, such as technological sciences, there are chunks of reality which are
systematically left out from the BOK, for various reasons. Sometimes is due to the need to simplify  , sometimes is convenience, other time is ignorance, or pure strategy

After travelling quite a lot, I look back at the  books that I was brough up with as a child, and I see very clearly so many false statements we were indoctrinated with as kids. It results from forcing 'real world' into schemas, to fix reality into defined points of space and time, when actually they are both relative to each other.

 Happens in science, but also history, geography. *remeber the definition of 'river' discussion?

We have seem from various examples how what is attributed to  Aristotele and the Greeks by modern literature, is actually faar more ancient
and geographically dislocated thant 'classical Greece', there is a political reason why we get

But this also happens between disciplines: any rigorous disciplinary approach, in order to stay valid must disregard axioms  knowl/accepted to other disciplines
(luckily that's changing a bit, but the transition to interdisciplinarity its slow  painful and full of dead bodies)

Of course we cannot expect every research programme to take into account 'all the knowledge' in all fields to date (would not be feasible)
Of course we are all likely to make errors and omissions cause also as humans we have cognitive limitations (actually, apparently there is no known limit of the human brain to momorise facts, which is fascinating, but we cannot remember everything that we know all at the same time, and when we
do, it cannot come across coherently) So even when we know things, we can easily lapse on them, dont you love human nature :-)

The power of collective intelligence  that I hope for the web  is not simply on the ability of supporting technologies to churn vasts amount of real time data, bless it, but also to extend  MEMORY to support not only reasoning power and also as ability to store, retrieve , cross reference much larger sets of facts from different sources/accounts, and query 'historical data'  and their respective contexts - necessary to achieve  Knowledge

A massively expandable parallel  external drive. then we would really have less excuses to justify ignorance, and the many wars that are caused over it


PDM

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-- 
Paola Di Maio
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Networked Research Lab, UK

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