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by mikewarot 1483 days ago
We never got to the information age, we got an age of paper emulation. True information weaves together many sources with a rich context. We never got the Memex, and it's been almost 80 years now.

On top of that, we got pop up ads, spam, and pages that are actively hostile to users intent.

The insult is far worse than you imagine.

1 comments

Even with some kind of memex, I think eventually information start to be repeated purposelessly.

I think eventually we need some kind of canonicalization in order to progress, in terms of knowledge/information organization, but I'm not sure if that's a doable in today's digital society.

Tell me a “fact” you want represented (or query pattern for finding one.)

All throughout history, the experts disagree with everything said before in a ten year cycle.

The the “Big Bang” for instance. It is junk science. It is fake news. The Big Bang stands for however it started and I have no idea, but wait, it must have gone something like this…

We’re always revising history, and disagreeing for decades over those revisions.

What would be a useful canonical fact? The weather? A sensor observation? A record of topical articles (all of them)?

It seems whatever you’re asking for needs every bit of everything, with an intelligent interface (curated, ranked, filtered, matched, and revision chronolized) for reviewing it.

What you need is a librarian cult, not less content.

"The begining of the universe was the big bang" is an example of such fact. Now, this sentence can and must be reviewed but the index over "how did the universe began" would keep track of it in that hypothetical platform. So, until it's reviewal, the sentence can be recognized as canonical.

An approximation to this goal can be found in the page of 'papers with code' where you can see the SOTA for a given set of problems (I've used for AI) so the question "what's the most performant model for face recognition" can be answer and keep track of over time. It may not be comprehensive and I can only account for it's AI coverage, but it resemblance some aspects of the general idea.