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2.7 There’s more than one way to describe something
“No, I’m not watching cartoons! It’s cultural anthropology.”
“This isn’t smut, it’s
art.”
“It’s not a bald spot, it’s a
solar panel for a sex-machine.”
Reasonable people can disagree forever on how to describe
something. Arguably, your Self is the collection of associations
and descriptors you ascribe to ideas. Requiring everyone to use
the same vocabulary to describe their material denudes the cog-
nitive landscape, enforces homogeneity in ideas.
And that’s just not right.
3. Reliable metadata
Do we throw out metadata, then?
Of course not. Metadata can be quite useful, if taken with a
sufficiently large pinch of salt. The meta-utopia will never come
into being, but metadata is often a good means of making rough
assumptions about the information that floats through the In-
ternet.
Certain kinds of implicit metadata are awfully useful, in fact.
Google exploits metadata about the structure of the World Wide
Web: by examining the number of links pointing at a page (and
the number of links pointing at each linker), Google can derive
statistics about the number of Web-authors who believe that that
page is important enough to link to, and hence make extremely
reliable guesses about how reputable the information on that
page is.
This sort of observational metadata is far more reliable than
the stuff that human beings create for the purposes of having
their documents found. It cuts through the marketing bullshit,
the self-delusion, and the vocabulary collisions.
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