Proposed Extensions to the Booleans

A quasitechnical nonproposal (ref):

☒□☒□☒□☒□☒□☒□☒□☒□☒□☒□☒□☒□☒□☒□☒□☒□☒□☒□☒

true because I say so
true because God says so
hidden truth
ultimate truth
penultimate truth
self-contradictory truth¹
true in all possible worlds
true even in impossible worlds
ironically true
true because the powerful have decreed it true
true despite that the powerful have tried to make it false
necessarily true
too beautiful not to be true
true for me but not for you
true for you but not for me²
true for all practical purposes
truth eventually universal; but for now unevenly distributed³
true for anybody with a shred of self-respect
truth of the master
truth of the slave
truth of the parent
truth of the child
forbidden truth
really forbidden truth
unspeakable truth
unbearable truth
truth nearly but not quite dead from overexposure
mostly true
sort-of true
“true”
occasionally true
conventional truth
conventionally unconventional truth⁴
self-aggrandizing truth
self-effacing truth
true because least improbable alternative
bought and paid for truth
casualty of war truth
official truth
underground truth
tentative truth
overbearing truth
true irregardless
true to truth itself
true despite all appearances

☒□☒□☒□☒□☒□☒□☒□☒□☒□☒□☒□☒□☒□☒□☒□☒□☒□☒

Footnotes

¹ h/t G. Spencer-Brown's imaginary values

² h/t "Bob" Dobbs: “I don’t practice what I preach because I’m not the kind of person I’m preaching to”

³ h/t William Gibson

⁴ aka "SlatePitch"

Semantic Con

I don't really mean the pun in the title; the Semantic Technologies conference was actually pretty interesting, in a hypeish sort of way. It represnts the attempt to diffuse a set of academic technologies and standards into industry. Note that while the standards (RDF, OWL, etc) are promoted and developed under the rubric "Semantic Web", the web is notably absent from the conference title. That's because these technologies are not being taken up so much in by the web proper, but are being sold to huge organizations with massive and complex data integration needs. These include defense (aero), intelligence, finance, and biotech. At the grassroots, it is being pushed by working life scientists trying to solve the same sorts of problems. Here's a presentation by Carole Goble that summarizes the hype pretty nicely, and without much technical detail.

The Semantic Web standards are complex, verbose, and hard to understand. They are backed by Web programmers prefer simpler standards: REST over SOAP, folksonomies over ontologies. Web guys do mashups and go to ETech; semantic technologists propose complex architectures and require large funders to get them realized.

It surprises me but it looks like the pressure of hard problems with good funding will overcome the complexity barrier of the Semantic Web. It surprises me not even so much because the syntaxes are complex and verbose, but the results are fairly inexpressive and inflexible in certain ways (for instance, OWL, the ontology standard, is based on description logic which makes it hard to do something as simple as default reasoning, something any simple old-fashioned frame system could do). Having been out of industrial grade AI for awhile, I will reserve judgement.

Ontology recapitulates phrenology

One-liner of the week:

An ontology is just an object model that's been to graduate school.