[JPKab]

Clay,

Just want to thank you for your great work.

I used to work on a lot of US Department of Defense projects, mostly stuff I can't talk about. One very notable project I CAN talk about was an initiative (pushed by utterly clueless, insular, and frankly corrupt academics) to spend billions of dollars in 2008-2010 timeframe on implementing Semantic Web technologies in various military business systems across the DoD.

As an actual technologist who knew how to build things, I was perpetually in the awful position of having to explain to leadership that these highly credentialed academics were selling garbage. I had tried to implement systems according to their design. The graph databases they pushed (they hated Neo4J, for reasons of purity because it didn't actually use RDF/OWL in the database...... i get a headache just talking about this...) were slow piles of dogshit that couldn't scale. No amount of reality could dissuade the academics. They had their theories, and any collision with reality was merely an implementation detail that I and my team were simply too incompetent to overcome in their eyes. Almost none of them had actual technical experience. A smattering of Comp Sci folks, and a ton of "Library Science" idiots.

Your essays on why the SemWeb was utter bullshit were a potent weapon I used with the generals the academics were pushing, and I eventually got the generals funding the project to see the light. Got them cancelled, and sent the idiot egg-heads packing. I still see them on LinkedIn to this day. They desperately continue trying to push that rock up the hill, and only recently warmed to more practical graph database solutions.

They HATED YOU. It was hilarious, watching them try to refute your obvious points and clear writing with jargon and hand-waving. Utterly unconvincing to the generals.

Thanks for your essays saving my ass back then!

[clay_shirky]

You cannot possibly know how much this delights me!

Most of my writing was about social media, back when the web was young, but "Ontology is Overrated" is actually my favorite thing I ever wrote, and it makes me happy beyond measure to know that it helped someone manage an actual argument over whether to buy into the semantic web!

I have never been talented enough to write production code, but I often thought of myself as trying to provide ammunition to people like you who are, when talking to bosses who didn't understand that the phrase "Now it's just a simple matter of programming!" was a bitter, sardonic joke, not an upbeat assessment of possibility.

Thank you for telling this story! This whole thread has been like hearing my own eulogy, but this in particular is just :chefs_kiss:

[JPKab]

Awesome! Yeah man, you nailed it all on the head back then, and yes, saved my ass. Sorry the thread felt like a eulogy. You've got a lot of mileage left in you my friend, and I'm looking forward to your future insights on the next big trends none of us are predicting yet.

The response of the academics to your writings was actually a master class for me in the nature of academic corruption and groupthink. What I learned from that experience was that (contrary to my prior beliefs) high IQ individuals are actually far more susceptible to cognitive dissonance than others are, not less so. They are far more adept at mentally constructing rationalizations and false realities that bolster and protect their existing belief systems from new information than most people are. Add to that the fact that they are extremely economically vulnerable to reputational damage, and you have a really toxic recipe.

[Kye]

Library Science is what librarians learn. It's a real thing for a real job. Like most credentials and like most jobs, some people try to over-fit experience and knowledge in one field to another.

You see the same with CompSci/tech people treating data like there's no bias in its collection.

[JPKab]

As I learned from the people on that project with lib sci degrees, the employment prospects are predominantly low-paying, but these ones found a new boondoggle to employ them as "ontologists" where they could get 6 figure salaries to sit around and build models all day in a piece of software called TopBraid Composer. (GUI program built in Eclipse, where users would create diagrams that would then be translated to an XML offshoot called OWL, a W3C standard that's never been successfully used in any meaningful project I've seen) I witnessed these people sit around and create business models and knowledge graphs of arcane Air Force business processes for 3 years (there were literally 9 of them doing this) before the project was cancelled due to its technical impossibility. The ontologies they created were never used once, and when I actually tried to provide them (in PDF form) to a separate project where Air Force personnel were trying to map out business processes, the personnel stated to me (in writing, with a Colonel CC'd) "These are so inaccurate that they are frequently misleading, and cannot be trusted." The Colonel later pulled me into his office and stated (rather comically): "You mean to tell me I've been paying people to draw cartoons for 3 years? We're not goddamned Disney here."

[nl]

I worked in this field with similar people for a few year.

100% concure with this view. The semantic web was one of the biggest wastes if time ever and set back the open web fatally.

[jacquesm]

Great story this. The difference between theory and practice has sunk many, many billions.