HalMorris

Search Engines and Oracles

Some time ago, I was following a conversation about Wolfram Alpha (http://www.wolframalpha.com/), an attempt to implement a sort of general purpose question answerer, something people have dreamed about computers doing for decades. Despite the theoretical availability to find out virtually anything from the Internet, we seem pretty far from any plausible approximation of this dream (at least for general consumption). My first attempt was: Q: "who was the first ruler of russia?" A: Vladimir Putin It's a problematic question that depends on questions like "When did Russia become Russia", or "What do we count, historically as Russia", or even what one means by "Ruler", and a reasonably satisfactory answer would have had to be fairly complicated -- either that, or the question would have to be reworded to be so precise that one name could serve as the answer. On another problematic question I thought it did rather well: Q: what is the airspeed velocity of an unladen african swallow? What occurred to me though, is that computer science could do something quite useful intermediate between "general purpose question answerer" and the old database paradigm of terms ANDed or ORed together. (Note that what Google does is neither of these, nor should it be placed on a straight line between the two -- but discussion of Google would take me far off topic). A simple example of what I'd really like is a search engine that matches *concepts*. Does anyone know of such a thing? If it exists, I should possibly read about it and shut up, but let me at least try to be sure I'm making the idea clear: E.g., I'd like to enter <<rulers of russia>>, and get a list of highly relevant articles. Or, I'd like to enter <<repair of transmission of "1957 Ford Fairlane">> and get few if any useless advertisements, and something much better than all articles containing the words "repair" "transmission" and "1957 Ford Fairlane" -- e.g., *not* an article on roof repair that happened to men

8Jul 8, 2014

HalMorris

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Gettier walks into a bar, um, barrista

Gettier walks up to the counter. Before he can order, the Barrista confuses him for a regular and chirps “I know what you want.” By coincidence, Gettier ends up with exactly the drink he desired. (from Alvin Goldman, Epistemologist Extraordinaire)

Apr 30, 2015-3

Narcissistic Contrarianism

The recent discussion on neo-reactionary-ism brought out some references to (intellectual hipsters and) meta-contrarianism linking to a 2010 posting by Yvain. For some time I've been thinking about "narcissistic contrarians" -- those who make an art form of their exotically counterintuitive belief systems, who combine positions not normally met in...

Nov 21, 20142

Irrationalism on Campus?

Since many LRers are fairly recent college graduates, it seems worthwhile to ask to what extent would people here agree with reports of rampant irrationalism such as this one: http://www.city-journal.org/2014/24_4_racial-microaggression.html from a right-leaning journalist known for her book The Burden of Bad Ideas (which I'm certainly not promoting). Some other...

Nov 20, 2014-1

From Natural (or Naturalized) to Social Epistemology

I've been reading an anthology called Naturalizing Epistemology (1986) edited by Hilary Kornblith. "Naturalizing" epistemology has been heavily identified with W.V.O. Quine (author of the 2 first articles in _Naturalizing Epistemology). Others draw parallels between naturalized epistemology and the much earlier philosophy of pragmatism, or John Dewey in particular, as...

Aug 6, 20144

Alternative to Campaign Finance Reform?

I'd like to throw this out as a test project, in case there are any takers, or rather for now, mostly throw it out for comment and criticism to see if it can be taken any further. Take a small town, say about 4000 pop., where people generally know each...

Aug 1, 2014-3

An even more modest search engine proposal

How much AI technique could it possibly take for google (or something better) to do a decent job with > speechby:obama attitude:positive "Saul Alinsky". I.e. "speechby:" and "attitude:" don't exist, but could, I believe be implemented pretty accurately, to see in this case if we can find any instances of...

Jul 26, 20147

Search Engines and Oracles

Jul 8, 20148

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HalMorris

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HalMorris

Search Engines and Oracles

My Best Case vs Your Worst Case

An even more modest search engine proposal

From Natural (or Naturalized) to Social Epistemology

HalMorris

Gettier walks into a bar, um, barrista

Narcissistic Contrarianism

Irrationalism on Campus?

From Natural (or Naturalized) to Social Epistemology

Alternative to Campaign Finance Reform?

An even more modest search engine proposal

Search Engines and Oracles

Search Engines and Oracles

My Best Case vs Your Worst Case

An even more modest search engine proposal

From Natural (or Naturalized) to Social Epistemology

Gettier walks into a bar, um, barrista

Narcissistic Contrarianism

Irrationalism on Campus?

From Natural (or Naturalized) to Social Epistemology

Alternative to Campaign Finance Reform?

An even more modest search engine proposal

Search Engines and Oracles