Re: [unrev-II] How DKR Penetration Will Be Achieved

From: Henry van Eyken (vaneyken@sympatico.ca)
Date: Sun Feb 27 2000 - 16:21:23 PST


From: Henry van Eyken <vaneyken@sympatico.ca>

Eric Armstrong wrote:

>
> Wouldn't it be nice if every paragraph in the original
> was a node in an outline, and everytime you pressed
> "reply" you could insert your response in the middle?
>
> Wouldn't be great if all the documents in the system
> has evaluation tags that showed the average evaluation
> and the number of evaluators, and perhaps the distribution?
> That would help solve the "which ideas are really good?"
> problem.

As for first paragraph, thatwould seem so.

As for second paragraph, I can see advertising agencies being paid for how
well they can subvert your good intentions. Here, from a Sept. 1999 news item:

"Procter & Gamble, whose $3.6bn worldwide advertising budget makes it the
world's
largest commercial persuader, is tying agency fees to increasing sales.
Advertising
agencies will receive a flat percentage of the global revenues from each of
the
company's brands.

"The change would align the agencies' interests more closely with those of
P&G, said
the company's global marketing officer. As each agency's fees would rise or
fall with
the fortunes of the brands it handled, they would have greater incentive to
ensure the
effectiveness of their campaigns. "Our overarching objective is to increase
top line
sales growth."

And Eric wrote in a next post in same thread:

> One of the thornier issues to solve is identifying situations where
> miscommunication occurs because different people have different meanings
> for the same term -- or the same meaning for different terms. It will
> require extremely high levels of intelligence to identify and resolve
> such problems. That may be two centuries out, if it is solvable at all.

Indeed. D.E. insists on words (nouns, verbs) having unambiguous meanings, but
there is so much meaning in phrasing as well.

I understand that English has about 30 percent redundancy for allowing
listeners to zero in on what speakers are trying to transmit. Lawyers try to
get around this by sense-dulling refinement. Math and computer languages cut
the chase to zero percent redundancy. Natural language interpreters try to
teach computers to interpret natural language. But natural languages change
continually.

Might it be possible to "discipline" a natural language so as to make
communication with computers free from misunderstanding? I imagine some people
must be working on that somewhere ...

Henry

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