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CauseNet: Towards a causality graph extracted from the web

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229 points geetee | 8 comments | 02 Sep 25 05:26 UTC | HN request time: 0.419s | source | bottom
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tgv ◴[02 Sep 25 07:42 UTC] No.45100192[source]▶
This makes little sense to me. Ontologies and all that have been tried and have always been found to be too brittle. Take the examples from the front page (which I expect to be among the best in their set): human_activity => climate_change. Those are such a broad concepts that it's practically useless. Or disease => death. There's no nuance at all. There isn't even a definition of what "disease" is, let alone a way to express that myxomatosis is lethal for only European rabbits, not humans, nor gold fish.
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tossandthrow ◴[02 Sep 25 08:23 UTC] No.45100399[source]▶
Ontology, not ontologies, have been tried.

We have quite a good understanding that a system cannot be both sound a complete, regardless people went straight in to make a single model of the world.

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kachnuv_ocasek ◴[02 Sep 25 10:51 UTC] No.45101306[source]▶
> a system cannot be both sound a complete

Huh, what do you mean by this? There are many sound and complete systems – propositional logic, first-order logic, Presburger arithmetic, the list goes on. These are the basic properties you want from a logical or typing system. (Though, of course, you may compromise if you have other priorities.)

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lemonwaterlime ◴[02 Sep 25 11:15 UTC] No.45101505[source]▶
My take is that the GP was implicitly referring to Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems with the implication being that a system that reasons completely about all the human topics and itself is not possible. Therefore, you’d need multiple such systems (plural) working in concert.
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1. eru ◴[02 Sep 25 11:40 UTC] No.45101729[source]▶
That doesn't make much sense.

If you take multiple systems and make them work in concert, you just get a bigger system.

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2. tossandthrow ◴[02 Sep 25 11:46 UTC] No.45101809[source]▶
Concerts - again plural. And naturally you only bring in appropriate instruments.
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3. jijijijij ◴[02 Sep 25 13:54 UTC] No.45103157[source]▶
> If you take multiple systems and make them work in concert, you just get a bigger system.

The conclusion may be wrong, but a "bigger system" can be larger than the sum of its constituents. So a system can have functions, give rise to complexity, neither of its subsystems feature. An example would be the thinking brain, which is made out of neurons/cells incapable of thought, which are made out of molecules incapable of reproduction, which are made from atoms incapable of catalyzing certain chemical reactions and so on.

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4. CuriouslyC ◴[02 Sep 25 14:16 UTC] No.45103427[source]▶
Sort of, the guardrail here IMO is you have an ontology processor that basically routes to a submodule, and if there isn't a submodule present it errors out. It is one large system, but it's bounded by an understanding of its own knowledge.
5. svnt ◴[02 Sep 25 14:46 UTC] No.45103806[source]▶
Turtles all the way down?
6. svnt ◴[02 Sep 25 15:02 UTC] No.45104021[source]▶
This is just emergence, though? How is emergence related to completeness?

This happens over and over with the relatively new popularization of a theory: the theory is proposed to be the solution to every missing thing in the same rough conceptual vector.

It takes a lot more than just pointing in the general direction of complexity to propose the creation of a complete system, something which with present systems of understanding appears to be impossible.

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7. jijijijij ◴[02 Sep 25 15:14 UTC] No.45104171{3}[source]▶
> How is emergence related to completeness?

I didn't make that argument. I think, the original conclusion above isn't reasonable. However, "a concert" isn't "just" a bigger system either, which is my point.

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8. svnt ◴[02 Sep 25 16:28 UTC] No.45105307{4}[source]▶
It just depends on your definition of system, doesn’t it?