Re: Research Illusion

SA: "I have the vision that research communities' crowd intelligence could 
be employed in the Web 2.0 style for deciding about research funding".

MB: "...we see people can vote resources...Allowing people to add 
ontology-based annotations is just similar and would be another step 
forward."
JC: "Google scholar provides citation counts, which while still a fairly 
rough measure, does include an idea of the importance of any piece of work."

PDeL: "I agree with the value of the wisdom of the crowd effect in many 
cases, however it should be controlled somehow to prevent the emergence of 
"foolishness of the crowd".

MP: "We second the idea of common standard ontologies for the semantic web 
use."



These points are all the significant sides and aspects of one problem, 
(Academic) Research Illusion: "deluding by creating illusory ideas", 
"considered scientific (magical) by laymen (naive observers)", " something 
what is false", "erroneous mental representation".

I incline to think that the "crowd intelligence" or "foolishness of the 
crowd" may explain the nature of the "phenomenon", and a canonic world model 
encoded as a machine-understandable common ontology standards of meanings 
may allow to head off it at all.

To my knowledge, there are no semantic applications on Intelligence and 
Collective Intelligence or Stupidity and Crowd Stupidity, what must be a big 
miss. Some public ventilation of these really critical issues could be of 
use, theoretical and practical.

Interestingly, while googling "Intelligence" (the power to perceive, learn, 
image, remember, understand, reason and think, will, or communicate), one 
gets 130 m hits, while looking for "Stupidity" (lack of intelligence, 
mentally limited, dumbness, ignorance, an absence of ideas), just 12,2 m 
hits. There was an economic historian Carlo Cipolla, who tried to formulate 
the fundamental laws of stupidity. One of them: A person is stupid if he 
causes damage to another person or group of people without experiencing 
personal gain, or even worse causing damage to themselves in the process. 
Accordingly, he distinguished four groups of people:

  1.. Intelligent people (bringing benefits to themselves and others, 
generating news values and assets);
  2.. Naive or Helpless people (bringing benefits to others and losses to 
themselves, enriching the few);
  3.. Criminals or Bandits (just redistributing the assets);
  4.. Stupid people (causing losses to themselves and society at large, 
destroying the assets).
Its is plain that of all sorts of stupidity, the most dangerous is the one 
coming from learned professionals, so there to put the academic research 
head gamers is an open question.

Community-based knowledge forums as Wikipedia are increasingly represented 
as collective intelligence (WikiMind symbiotic intelligence) projects. 
Apropos, other legacy examples of collective intelligence (or stupidity?) 
are political parties (for nation-wide political stupidity or global 
political dullness are sitting here).

The Group Intelligence (group mind, collective intelligence, crowd wisdom) 
implies collectively solving complex problems by means of networked ICT (as 
the Internet and Web) resulting in enhancing individual minds and 
self-identity. Or, technically, it is about a global virtual collaboration 
of individual minds guided by standard ontological world models and semantic 
technologies as well as by peering, sharing, objectivity and professional 
knowledge.

By contrast, Group Stupidity suggests all sort of costly academic research 
illusions at the cost of degrading individual minds and losing 
self-identity, technically aggravated by numerous separate ontologies and 
views and disjoint applications.

Azamat Abdoullaev

http://www.eis.com.cy



PS: As a side note, propose to establish ASA, Academic Stupidity Awards 
(with categories in each knowledge domain, the stupidest idea, the stupidest 
article, the stupidest research project, the stupidest academician; for 
political correctness to use "unintelligent" instead of "stupid"). And 
please don't mix it with Ig Noble prizes, 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ig_Noble, having some sense. The existent World 
Stupidity Awards will then become just a funny joke.


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Sören Auer" <auer@informatik.uni-leipzig.de>
To: "Jeremy Carroll" <jeremy@topquadrant.com>
Cc: "'Azamat'" <abdoul@cytanet.com.cy>; "'[ontolog-forum] '" 
<ontolog-forum@ontolog.cim3.net>; "'SW-forum'" <semantic-web@w3.org>; 
<mjarrar@cs.ucy.ac.cy>
Sent: Friday, May 08, 2009 11:04 PM
Subject: Re: Research Illusion


Jeremy Carroll wrote:
> Google scholar provides citation counts, which while still a
> fairly rough measure, does include an idea of the importance
> of any piece of work.

I agree that citation counts are a pretty good estimate of a works impact.

A more severe problem from my point of view is the distribution of
research funds.

Existing paradigms seem to be either biased towards large established
organizations or well-connected, long established individuals. For
innovative ideas and younger researchers it is much harder.

I have the vision that research communities' crowd intelligence could be
employed in the Web 2.0 style for deciding about research funding [1].

--Sören

[1] http://wiki.cofundos.org/

Received on Saturday, 9 May 2009 19:05:39 UTC