::scr Delegation

[jo walsh]

> > why do you want to be told what to care about?

> (Sorry but I find this much more interesting than the Semantic Web thread.

i think it all connects. :)

> The answer is yes, we really do need to be spoonfed, and told what to care
> about.

it's a question that doesnt really have an answer; conversational,
post-dialectical. i certainly don't want to be part of your 'we'. it looks  
a massive societal assumption which entails massive social/psychic
unhappiness, and this is something which i see the tech, and the ideas,
behind the semantic bot net as *directly addressing*.     

one of the key ideas behind the semnet is the translucent addressability
of things, the encapsulation of sets of concepts behind concepts, but
based on namespace trust, on a kind of Temporary Source of Authority, like
a mobile DNS. to take a general example, you have a lot of meaning
encapsulatd in the phrase 'asylum seekers'. you can refer upwards towards
the daily mail's definition of asylum seekers, or to the guardian's; to
tony blair's, or to tony benn's. 

this is a way of defining what you care about, semantically, at a certain
level of detail. the completeness of the encapsulation, and the extent to
which you trust the source, arbitrate what you care about to a great
extent. this seems like a wonderful and terrible power. i see, in the
semnetbot tools, a way to keep arbitration mobile, to obviate the closed
system effect by giving real people better tools and easier ways to
broaden their context for things that they personally care about, whether
that's the amount of burnt-out cars in their street, the quality of
facilities at their childrens' or grandchildrens' schools, the
offensiveness of the genderist adverts on their street corner. it's a way
of getting people talking to each other and decentralising media
filtering, without having to try too hard to do either.                            
  
> I delegate cooking my veg to my electric steamer because it's far more
> suited to the task than I am.

well, this kind of behavioural delegation makes sense. my bot has
subsystems to which it delegates almost every task except talking and
thinking; banal stuff like talking to different web services and scraping
and searching. i would like to delegate many repetitive, physical tasks
which don't entertain or enlighten me. 

> I delegate watching TV to my Tivo because it
> seems to be far more interested in most of the tv shows than I am.

isnt this a douglas adams joke? ;P 

> So why's it so bad to delegate campaigning and caring about stuff to the
> people that actually give a shit?

because campaigning looks like advocacy looks like evangelism; looks
counterproductive. the likes of theothermattjones and shirky encourage, by
presenting critically important ideas at an illusive level of detail based
on their rapidly-researched, flat-pattern understanding of context,
achieve little more than provoke counterproductive flamewars amongst
people who are not writing code and not having interesting ideas.     

> If we're not spoonfed an executive
> summary how can we tell if this semantic web thingy is something we are
> interested in getting more deeply involved in?

am i helping at all? i know you have a high quality brane. 

here's some more pointers i forgot in the last batch:

http://www.w3.org/RDF/FAQ
http://www.w3.org/TR/2002/WD-rdf-primer-20020319/
http://rss.benhammersley.com/
http://www.hughbarnard.org/ - just a friend of mine, not rdf related

zx
--
"Common sense won't tell you. We have to tell each other." -DNA