Mike, On 9/19/08, Mike Tintner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Steve: Thanks for wringing my thoughts out. Can you twist a little > tighter?! > > A v. loose practical analogy is mindmaps - it was obviously better for > Buzan to develop a sub-discipline/technique 1st, and a program later. >
MAJOR difference: Buzan's iMindMap does his own particular method, whereas Dr. Eliza is designed to do EVERYONE's methods, being easily extensible by simply adding more knowledge. Dr. Eliza's limitations affect the problems it can handle, rather than the knowledge it can use. > > What you don't understand, I think, in all your reasoning about "repair" is > that there is probably no principle - however obvious it seems to you, that > will not be totally questioned and contradicted, and reasonably so, by > someone else. > Agreed. So what?! What you don't understand is that the better repairmen are made that way by having larger/different assortments of techniques, often to succeed where repairmen with lesser assortments failed. That there are a few worthless techniques in the assortment is (almost) irrelevant. The ONLY significance of worthless techniques is that they can waste some time, unless of course you allow them to consume a LOT of time (and sometimes enough to kill you), as "modern" medicine now so often does. > > The proof is in the pudding. Get yourself a set of principles together, and > try them out on appropriately interested parties - some of your potential > audience/customers - *before* you go to the trouble of programming. > There is a major communications/worldmodel disconnect of some sort here. Much of my life has been doing some sort of repair - auto, electronic, medical, etc. Often, I have succeeded where other "experts" had previously failed. Their "missing piece" was usually their inability to use what they DID know to effect the repair, and in failing to do obviously-needed research when dead ends were reached. If there is already a formal "repair theory" of some sort other than individuals opinions in various sub-domain books, then I have completely missed it. Hence, there is no present body of knowledge or experts, nor people with broad enough experience to value their opinions beyond obviousness. > That's obviously good technological/business practice. Do some market > research. I think you'll learn a lot. > If I were selling a technique like Buzan then I would agree. However, someone selling a tool to merge ALL techniques is in a different situation, with a knowledge engine to sell. Finally, I absolutely agree that many/most experts will reject something like Dr, Eliza, as I have already seen in the medical domain. I have a friend who is the Director of Research at a major university's medical center, and we have discussed this at length. Mainstream medicine is now SO far off track that Americans now spend more money on alternative health than they do on mainstream medicine. This is all wrapped up in degrees, egos, value of old and stale knowledge, inability to keep up to date on entire domains, lack of basic skills, etc., etc. In short, I hear your comments about market research. That is why I see Dr. Eliza as a knowledge fusion tool that could potentially work across the entire Internet and NOT a tool to support "experts". I see something like Dr. Eliza as a sort of alternative/successor to Internet Explorer to fuse the Internet to solve problems rather than being just another AI program that might be useful in some sub-domains. What seems SO very obvious to me and what seems to escape everyone else is: The value of knowledge fusion across the Internet seems to be granted by many people. There are a number of projects now working in this direction, e.g. the one at Wikipedia. They all have absolutely insurmountable faults (e.g. the inability to recognize statements of symptoms of the conditions described in various articles) that I have written about on many occasions and will simply never work. I have running demo code to show a way that actually works. Some people have expressed objections, e.g. the need for additional human-entered meta-information, yet no one has shown even a suggestion that there is a way around these objections - that they aren't inherent in the task. Why aren't people starting with my approach and refining it, rather than continuing in other directions with no apparent (informed) hope of ever working? To answer my own question: People act in response to motivation, and their motivations are NOT aligned with success. They need to push out a paper to get their PhD, they are organizing a group of people to work for free on a project when no one would hire them as a project manager, etc. Anyway, until a better realization comes along and bops me on the head, that is the way I see it. Do you see things differently? Steve Richfield ------------------------------------------- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=114414975-3c8e69 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
