Oddbean new post about login | logout Dewey, Peirce, and the rest of the Pragmatists might roll over in their grave. Honestly, I think they meant well with classification systems but I think those systems have held human thought back for far longer than was good. There was no way for "Emergent Classification" to exist under the Dewey Decimal or Library of Congress Classification systems. Hell, I see this being applied to things like lichen and fungus classification because those guys have been scratching their heads for well over a century trying to figure out what's related to what.
Yup. This concept stems originally from biology journal analysis.
I know because I was there. I am THAT OLD fr. 😂
Did my undergrad in cell and molecular biology. Lots of journal reading here.
THAT EXPLAINS IT. 😂 We were amazed that anyone else understood anything we were saying because until now, it's been us talking excitedly amongst ourselves in public, while everyone is like https://c.tenor.com/90dFwxuNWpMAAAAC/tenor.gif
I tested a software project decades ago, that allowed you to navigate scientific journals using word bubbles.
Any efficacy at all?
Yes, it was actually really cool. You could type in the name of a protein molecule, for instance and see a cluster of articles containing that name, with articles closer to the center having the most references and the bubble size indicating how often it contained that word. Or you could type in nothing and just brows around the entire collection, by clicking on words. You didn't have to even know what you were looking for, when you "entered the library". You could just look around and see if anything was interesting. But I left the company and I thought the idea had been abandoned. I only saw visual data navigation after that with Kibana and Graphene, but the visualisation wasn't as emersive. And then I saw some stuff on graphical databases. And then Liminal showed up here and was like, listen yo, I got this idea from biology... Turns out, the idea is still alive and it's more advanced now. And we're not only going to use it for biology. 😁
Historical data would be another fascinating thing. like, I was listening to a podcast, yesterday, from a German scientist who moves to DC and analyzed movements in interest rates and the White House visitors book. There's a correlation and he found the causation: Fed Chairman being ordered to appear in the Presidents' office.
