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How It All Goes Wrong (WAS RE: Triplets on the Internet)

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• Subject: How It All Goes Wrong (WAS RE: Triplets on the Internet)
• From: "Bullard, Claude L (Len)" <len.bullard@i...>
• Date: Wed, 23 Jun 2004 09:54:55 -0500
• Cc: "'danny666@v...'" <danny666@v...>

Here's a pretty good example of how it all goes wrong 
even when humans are making the selections:

http://www.perrspectives.com/

Some say Google is doing what the Semantic Web proposes, 
but the mammals put their biases into their selections 
and this means that as the selection process itself 
is centralized (the critical one:  the choice of choices), 
biases become system selectors.  See Tim Bray's question at 
Ongoing.

http://tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2004/06/22/GoogleCensor

Tim isn't sure if it is stupid or evil.  My assessment 
is that it is an example of stupid becoming evil.  Such 
systems must provide feedback-correction; yet we then 
realize that as Joshua Allen points out, this is a closed 
system (Google), not an open system, and self-correction 
is not assured.  The owners of Google have allowed their 
company and its services to become players in the politics 
of the American electorate.

That is unacceptable but at least Larry and Sergey's 
faces are on that decision and Tim can push back.

So now we envision a future where these same biases are 
entering ontologies used for machine to machine communications. 
This is the Golem problem at its clearest and most easily 
understood.   Speed of light advocacy by amplifying  
biases in a faceless medium is dangerous in the extreme.

len

From: Danny Ayers [mailto:danny666@v...]

One final point is that no matter how good the trust and information 
system, the actions that result may have little bearing on their truth 
or validity. The suggestion of weapons of mass destruction is enough to 
justify a war - the evidence is orthogonal.

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