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CauseNet: Towards a causality graph extracted from the web

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229 points geetee | 4 comments | 02 Sep 25 05:26 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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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. jijijijij ◴[02 Sep 25 13:40 UTC] No.45102980{3}[source]▶
I believe, neither the expansion of Gödel's theorems to "everything", non-formalized systems, nor the conclusion of a resolution by harnessing multiple systems in concert, are sound reasoning. I think, it's a fallacious reductionism.
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2. tossandthrow ◴[02 Sep 25 14:13 UTC] No.45103383[source]▶
What is a non-formalized system?

I am very curious on this. In particular, if you are able to split systems into formalized and non formalized, then I thinks there are quite some praise and a central spot in all future history books for you!

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3. jijijijij ◴[02 Sep 25 15:04 UTC] No.45104042[source]▶
I am not a native speaker, so please don't get hung up on particular expressions.

I meant, the colloquial philosophies and general ontology are not subject of Gödel's work. I think, the forgone expansion is similar to finding evidence for telepathy in the pop-sci descriptions of quantum entanglement. Gödel's theorems cover axiomatic, formal systems in mathematics. To apply it to whatever, you first have to formalize whatever. Otherwise, it's an intuition/speculation, not sound reasoning. At least, that's my understanding.

Further reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del's_incompleteness_th...

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4. ◴[02 Sep 25 15:17 UTC] No.45104205{3}[source]▶