ONT Re: Inquiry Driven Systems
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DM = Douglas McDavid
JA = Jon Awbrey
DM: I meant to keep this discussion on-list, and just forgot
to hit my "reply to all" button. Thanks for noticing that.
DM: We are now on a footing of very substantial mutual understanding.
You have coined a term which perfectly expresses what I intended
to say, and that term is "peer communication". We are also in
perfect agreement that your concern is with "dialogue in nature",
which you have stated many times over the last many months, and
neologized acronymically as "DIN". I have personally learned
a lot from your writings, which have given me cause to pause
to think of things from a fresh perspective, even when I have
not always had the time or ability to fully understand and
assimilate your arguments.
DM: At the same time, I think this may be the source of much
of the unpleasantness that has erupted from time to time
in this venue around your work. I suspect (though I won't
presume to speak for them), that some significant number of
the participants in the IEEE ontology lists are more focused
on the peer communication (PC) problem than the DIN. If this
is at all the case, then large numbers of complex and demanding
utterances of the DIN variety would tend to be seen as diverting
from the main line of PC discussion.
let me pause and focus on a couple of issues that i see at this point.
1. 'peer communication' is an extremely ambiguous term, or
let's say it has many splintered orders of approximation:
at 1st approximation all human being are peers.
at 2nd approximation all members of a given culture are peers.
at 3rd approximation all adult members of a given culture are peers.
at 4th approximation all adult members in a given discipline are peers.
at 5th approximation all adult members expert in a given discipline are peers.
ad infinitum?
no sense taking this too seriesly as we are clearly already in a poset situation
rather than a strict linear ordering, but that's enough as a rough approximation.
i think that most of the play on this field in is probably caught
slightly off-base between 3rd & 4th, depending on what you mean
by 'culture' & 'discipline'. often we are peers simply because
we are making some attempt to communicate with each other, but
on many occasions our disciplinary & experiential dis-peerages
will be almost orthogonal or skew or transversal to each other,
and when that happens, it's almost as bad as that original din.
2. i probably tend to confound these issues (pc & din) a bit more than most
because i got introduced to both of them in full force at the same time.
even though i started out in a 'duel major' (sic) between math & phys,
i did not really get a lab rat's sense of empirical science until
much later, when i had gotten disaffected from math and revived
my ancient interest in psych, eventually escalating the duel
to a trial, but in math, psych, & comp sci. in fact, one
of the persisting lessons that i learned from psych folk
was a respect for the reality of experiential phenomena,
the din side of the force. but i also got experienced
with radical culture shock, and i found out just how
difficult, nigh unto impassible, trans-disciplinary
communication can be in practice.
DM: It seems to me that what you are doing is a two-fold endeavor.
One purpose is to work out fundamental issues in a dialogic manner,
hoping to engage with a community who might be expected to share,
or least understand, the issues of human and artificial thought over
which your professional inquiry ranges. The other purpose is to create
a repository of material that can be used to illuminate specific issues
of the larger DIN inquiry, when they have particular bearing on the ongoing
PC inquiry. At least this is the way I think of the material you are posting.
It is like the content of a seminar, which, while I haven't registered this
semester, is being delivered now. But because it is being delivered into
a public and permanent record, it will be available in any semester when
my schedule is not filled with other requirements and electives.
well, i do have people from 30 or 40 years ago that i am still in
imaginary dialogue with, even though some of them i only check in
with every decade or so to let them know if i worked out any new
answers to their initial questions. but, y'know, i forget stuff
that i've written only a few months ago, and it's getting easier
to find a lot of it with google than it is to dig it out of my
own filing systems, or lack thereof.
and again, i tend to see a much closer relation between the original din
and the peer comm enterprise, especially when the latter mal-functions and
puts us back behind the 'veil of ignorance' (rawls?) or the 8-ball of chaos
and entropy and bare uncertainty. i think that it would do us good to reflect
on these moments of 'day to day inquiry situations' where the relevant measure
of entropy is the amount of disconsensus in the group, but of course, any sort
of group-process biopsy is totemly taboo for us engineering types.
DM: Now, with respect to practitioners, I agree that this is an important
issue. I have never really lived outside the practitioner community,
and I know that the anyting that is available to make their jobs easier.
A massive library of standards and utilities has been built up, such that
even the most idiosyncratic practitioners find it natural to use existing
operating system utilities, user interface widgets, and the like. I think
some of us on this list have an idea that a set of ontological utilities may
be created that will take their place in the library of practitioner tools,
in a similar way. Beyond that, when it comes to matters of integration
across multi-enterprise e-business value nets, the very essence of the
practitioner mission is to provide for semantic transparency of commerce.
Practitioners in such an environment know that only at their peril can
they allow their idiosyncrasies to trump the mission.
okay, but 'practitioner' is another one of those ambiguously nuanced (shady) terms.
1. it can mean anybody who has learned a skill, and is trying to put it to work.
2. it can mean those other practitioners, the ones who practice those dark arts.
most of the time that i was actually getting a paycheck it was as a practitioner
of the deadly dull comp/dat/stat arts, and thus of necessity inter-farcing with
practitioners of some -- how did they say it? -- more 'substantive' science.
so, i know from experience that even when there are pre-established and pre-ordained
standard methods and tools, from anova to factor analysis to clustering to multiple
regression and all the ancillary stat packages you could want, that it's still a bit
of a problem getting 'those other practitioners' to believe you when you tell them
that using the tools the right way will make a difference and maybe even tell them
something that their practical intuition did not already tell them before running
the experiment and analyzing the data according the 'customs and practices' of
your own dark art. and that's for standard stuff that they have already been
brainwashed by their md, rn, phd programs to give lip service to. try to
get an innovation funded and you really have to show that your automated
insight in the mysteries of the 'madonna eating a cheese sandwich before
ascending the stairway to heaven' will reveal something to them that they
(a) really needed to know, (b) couldn't already figure out for themselves.
i do not think that we are anywhere near that point yet, and in some
circles of discursion that i read 'over yonder', there does not seem
to be even much awareness of this whole dimension of needs-analysis.
DM: In any event, now that we have the language of the
PC subset of the universe of DIN, I for one will
have a sturdier platform to stand on as the
Awbrey Express rumbles on by.
Thanks for all of that.
q-q-q-choo ...
jon awbrey
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