Hold Your Horses!

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

Gavin Clabaugh tells a wonderful story about the origins of the saying, “Hold your horses,” and cites a number of every day examples of our inability to adapt to change:    (M10)

Confronted by today’s rapid pace of technological change, organizations hold a lot of horses; the faster the change, the more horses. We all do it. We treat web sites like magazines, databases like report producers, voicemail like a “while you were out” pad, and email like it was direct mail….    (M11)

Non profits are not immune — in fact they’re probably worse. Working with nonprofits as a consultant, I’ve often walked into what felt like an imaginary stable, horses being held steady to the left and right; a regular day at the races. To quote again Dr. [Elting Morison], “The tendency is apparently involuntary and immediate to protect oneself against the shock of change by continuing in the presence of altered situations the familiar habits, however incongruous, of the past.”    (M12)

…    (M13)

Language too, can show you where the horses are stabled: it’s slow to keep up. When things are in flux, language usually reflects the associated angst. That’s why you still here the phrase “in the can” when a news crew finishes a video shoot — it refers to the act of putting the film into a sealed container or “can.” Film is gone, and so is the can, but the language has failed to adapt. The examples are everywhere: “b-roll,” “post-modern,” “post-industrial,” “login,” and “boot,” or for that matter, “reboot.” Our brains hold horses and we don’t even notice. I shudder, for example, when I hear voicemail with a message like: “Can you call me back. I need to ask you a question.” We’re thinking pink “While you were out” pads. Sadly, I am not immune.    (M14)

There are several good stories like, “Hold your horses.” Paul Graham relates a great one from Primo Levi on varnish recipe that called for one raw onion. And I’ve heard several people tell the story about the family recipe for roast that called for slicing off the end of a perfectly good hunk of meat. (The grandmother originally did this because her oven was too small to hold the entire roast.) And if you like similar stories about the origins of our language, check out Bill Bryson‘s, Made In America: An Informal History of the English Language in the United States.    (M15)

I don’t mind the fact that language doesn’t adapt with the times. But I definitely mind when people and organizations fail to adapt. Not that it’s easy. Gavin’s conclusion is especially important:    (M16)

Organizations too, fight back against change, eliminating all but the slimmest possibility of “change from within.” In the same study, Morison concludes that “[T]he deadlock between those who sought change and those who sought to retain things as they were was only broken by an appeal to a superior force, a force removed from, and unidentified with, the mores, conventions, and devices of the society.” The argument, the great generalization, here is that no institution can reform itself. Truly, it’s a rare institution that can. That reform requires rare bravery, rare vision and even rarer leadership. And, it is why, the view from without is so valuable sometimes. I could see the bridles in the hands of the cabin attendants. They could not.    (M17)

Folksonomy Taxonomy Philosophy

Posted on Published by Eugene Eric Kim

I love playing The Book of Questions types of games with friends and colleagues, but when it comes to answering those types of questions myself, I’m a terrible waffler. When I play these games with my friend, Steph, she often complains scornfully, “You’re such a ‘P’.” “P” refers to the “Perceiving” Myers-Briggs personality type, which refers to folks who are highly context-sensitive (also known as “wafflers”).    (LNM)

Suffice it to say, I hate truisms (except for that one). You could even call me a “philosophical relativist,” which according to Elaine Peterson, would make me a fan of folksonomies. Also true. And in a metaphysical twist that will drive the less philosophically-inclined (and Steph) crazy, if you were to ask me if folksonomies were better than taxonomies, I would respond, “That’s not a valid question.” Folksonomies and taxonomies are not quite apples and oranges, but they’re not apples and apples either. Debating the two is intellectually interesting, but it obscures the real opportunity, which is understanding how the two could potentially augment each other.    (LNN)

The impetus for this little outburst is Gavin Clabaugh‘s recent piece on folksonomies. Gavin (who cites Peterson’s essay) argues that taxonomies are better for finding information than folksonomies. Do I agree with that? It depends. Clay Shirky outlined some situations when taxonomies are better for search and vice-versa in his excellent essay, “Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags”.    (LNO)

What troubles me about the claim at all is that it highlights a distinction that I find to be misleading. In Elaine Peterson‘s essay, “Beneath the Metadata: Some Philosophical Problems with Folksonomy,” the main problem she cites has to do with philosophical relativism. Folksonomies allow it; traditional classification does not.    (LNP)

What is philosophical relativism? If I show you a picture of a mono-colored object, is it possible for that object to be both black and white? If you answered yes, you’re a philosophical relativist.    (LNQ)

On the surface, “philosophical relativist” might sound like another term for “dumb as hell.” But, what if the picture was of a person? And what if that person had an African-American father and a Caucasian mother? Now is it possible to classify this photo as both “black” and “white”?    (LNR)

Language is highly context-sensitive. Philosophical relativists acknowledge this. Believe it or not, so do librarians and traditional taxonomists. A taxonomy attempts to make classification more useful by restricting the scope to a single context. If you happen to be operating within that context, then this works great. There are plenty of situations when this is the case (Gavin cites the medical community, which is a great example), but there are also plenty of situations when it’s not.    (LNS)

Folksonomies allow for multiple contexts, but that does not make them inherently less useful than taxonomies. As Clay points out in his essay, in practice, there’s a long tail of tags applied to different concepts. If something is tagged “black” by 98 people and “white” by two, you can be pretty sure that the object in question is “black.” Scale essentially transforms a folksonomy into a taxonomy with a little bit of noise that can easily be filtered out (if desired).    (LNT)

Frankly, I think the concern is less about whether taxonomies are inherently better than folksonomies and more about whether so-called experts should have a role in constructing taxonomies. Gavin also alludes to this, when he describes a conversation with two friends in a San Francisco coffee shop. (I don’t want to out those friends, but I will say that one of them runs a company named after the faithful companion of a certain oversized lumberjack from American folklore. I will also say that Gavin is an outstanding tea companion, and that we’re working on a project that has very little to do with folksonomies, but that will make the world a much better place regardless.)    (LNU)

Gavin’s friends suggested that folksonomies were a great way of collaboratively developing a taxonomy. Gavin partially agreed, but expressed some doubt, stating:    (LNV)

Rather than the wisdom of a crowd, I’d recommend the wisdom of a few experts within that crowd. In the end you’d end up with a more accurate and useful taxonomy, with half of the wasted bandwidth, and in probably a tenth of the time.    (LNW)

I can actually think of many situations where I would agree with this. One is Pandora, the music recommendation service built on top of the Music Genome Project. The Music Genome Project is a formal ontology for classifying music developed by 50 musician-analysts over seven years. By all accounts, the service is extraordinarily good. Chris Allen sang its praises to me at the last WikiWednesday, and it was all the rage at the original Bar Camp.    (LNX)

But having experts involved doesn’t preclude using a folksonomy to develop a taxonomy. Is a folksonomy developed by a small group of experts any less of a folksonomy?    (LNY)

In 2002, Kay-Yut Chen, Leslie Fine, and Bernardo Huberman developed a prediction market using Wisdom of Crowds techniques for financial forecasting of a division of HP. The market was 40 percent more accurate than the company’s official forecast. The catch? The people playing the market were the same people doing the official forecast. The difference was not in who was doing the predicting; the difference was in the process.    (LNZ)

I’m a historian by background. I have a great appreciation for the lessons of the past, which is reflected in my patterns-based approach towards improving collaboration. Five years ago, I reviewed Elaine Svenonius‘s wonderful book, The Intellectual Foundation of Information Organization, where I wrote:    (LO0)

Fortunately, a small segment of our population, librarians, has been dealing with the problem of information organization since 2000 B.C. Who better to turn to in our time of need than people with thousands of years of accumulated expertise and experience?    (LO1)

There is a tremendous amount of past knowledge that I’m afraid is being passed off as trite and irrelevant, when in fact it is even more relevant today. How many people building tagging systems know about Faceted Classification? How many of these developers know of Doug Lenat‘s brilliant research on Cyc, or that a huge subset of the Cyc ontology is open source? On the flip side, how many librarians and ontologists are needlessly dismissing folksonomies as not as good, and hence irrelevant?    (LO2)

Philosophical debates over taxonomy and folksonomy are exactly that: philosophy. I love philosophy. I enjoyed Peterson’s essay, and I’d recommend it to others. Curiously enough, David Weinberger, one of folksonomy’s foremost evangelists, is also a philosopher by background. (Read his response to Peterson’s essay.)    (LO3)

However, philosophy sometimes obscures reality, or worse yet, opportunity. We should be focusing our efforts on understanding how taxonomies and folksonomies can augment each other, not on picking sides.    (LO4)