Shirky on RELATIONSHIP, again
Clay is getting defensive about the responses to his criticism of RELATIONSHIP. While I actually agree with Clay about the futility of ontology for expressing relationships, I am awed at how he completely snows us with intellectualism and dances around the issue without admitting that his original criticism was flawed. It’s an indignant cry of ?how dare you respond to what I said; you should respond to what I meant!? If people got the wrong idea from his first post, it’s because that’s what he clearly conveyed. His second criticism gets it right, but his first was clearly an attempt at criticising RELATIONSHIP on a pragmatic level.
Early inthe first post, he triumphantly declares, ?Or, more realistically, what if you would call someone your boss in one setting, colleague in another, collaborator in a third, and say they are someone you work with in a fourth??. Touche? Hardly!That particular sentence, and much of what followed,betrayed a surprising lack of basic knowledge about RELATIONSHIP, and IMO left the article reeling for lack of credibility. In fact, it made me question whether he understands the most basic concepts of Semantic Web, which puts his comments about ?the new machine learning? in the followup post in a different light for me.