Another example of concrete reality : that FQXI contest itself
There are even problems which professional researchers themselves
struggle with in their professional activity, including the very
activity of wondering about the world's problems and possible
solutions, yet they may still fail to consider their struggle as an
example of problem to be listed as a possible object of
consideration in their general study. Actually, to discover
examples, we don't need to search very far. Indeed a remarkable one
is here directly under hand.
Consider the problem that the fqxi organizers were facing in the
beginning of 2014: they were curious about ideas that many people
from all over the world may have about how should humanity steer the
future. Most people, in front of such a problem, would simply browse
the web for answers, trying different key expressions for this
search, or would browse some specialized sites already listing such
ideas, such as the site of the New Civilization Network. But it
seems that they did not expect this kind of search to provide as
good quality answers as they wished. Indeed, it would need quite a
deal of luck to guess the right keywords that need to be tried in a
search engine, that would successfully lead where the best answers
on the topic might be found; for any expression that can be tried,
any interesting result would be lost in a lot of rubbish,
out-of-subject search results. So they tried another method instead.
And a quite expensive one, in fact: the method they chose to search
for answers, was to open an essay contest on this topic, putting
tens of thousand $$ on the table inviting anyone in the world to
provide their own answers, and to rate each other's essays. But what
did they expect in doing so ? Did they think that it would
effectively stimulate the writing of new ideas that nobody wrote or
put accessible on the web yet ? Did they seriously think, that if
someone had or was able to develop a great idea to change the world,
he would have waited for this contest to be open before writing it
and putting it on the web ?
Admittedly, their method happened to work for me in this year's
contest (2015 on the link between math and physics) : some of my
best possible ideas which I had not fully written yet but parts of which I
happened to have written just before, turned out to fit quite
well with their questions, which stimulated me to actually write
them nicely in this format, while such coincidences did not happen
(or I did not feel them well enough) in previous years even though
some of my writings did somehow answer some of their questions.
However, I consider this a matter of chance, that they might stumble
on the right questions to request as an essay contest, for some of
the most interesting truths to fit their expected format and come
up.
Actually for 2014 I had the kind of great ideas they were searching
for, and I did put them freely accessible on the web since long ago.
But they didn't know it, and, if they tried searches with keywords,
they probably failed to see it.
So, indeed, current systems of web search were not good enough, but
was their own expensive method better ? Well, I may have seen their
contest opening but I was anyway busy at that time (as I'll explain
below) and I did not feel their expected format as very suitable to
try formatting my ideas into: 9 pages would be clearly insufficient
to explain all what would need to be explained, and, as I already
did a lot of work to explain my ideas to hundreds of people, I was
quite fed up with the idea of having to work putting things all over
again in a new format that seemed a quite unrealistic format to put
into anyway.
Still I deeply sympathize with their felt need to have every
contribution put in no more than 9 pages because it is so awfully
boring to have to read so many packs of pointless bullshit as they
anyway usually receive in countless numbers at every contest they
open, the multiplication of their boredom by a too big size of every
pointless entry would surely make their work completely desperate.
So the question remains : if the main point of their contest
openings with the prizes they offer, was to serve as "better web
search engines" to collect already existing good works and ideas,
than more usual automatic search engines which are admittedly quite
poor at this task, then, is their contest method a so much more
efficient search engine for the task ? I'm afraid not, as I see it
overwhelmed with worthless results that waste a lot of time to
review as well.
Still, did they start seriously studying the question of what kind
of search method might be really more efficient than this ? It seems
not. And it is understandable. Because it does not seem that a small
group can easily succeed implementing a better solution for just
themselves to better search and find the answers to their specific
questions. A real major improvement cannot be done in an isolated
manner by a small group for a specific search ; a whole new World
Wide Web with much more general and pervasive restructured searching
abilities would be required instead, for any specific search to be
eased inside it as a particular case. It is quite frightening to
dare thinking about the complexity of that problem.
Concretely, it would have been so convenient to them if they had a
search engine able to detect the fact that, when I happened to
explain and debate my solution to an audience, about 99% of the
people usually turned out to be convinced after debate about the
excellence of this solution. The problem was, this information could
not enter the web to be available for automated processing, because
the participants of these debates did not have an online system
under hand where to enter this information of their conviction level
for this processing. A kind of system which precisely my project
would provide... if it was implemented. I did not precisely focus on
this specific kind of information but more on the general problem of
the needed global structure of the network that would make many
kinds of trusted information networks much easier to implement; I
include solutions to similar problems with some common patterns with
this one, namely the problem of trust and reputation, the general
measure of indirect agreement to something through delegates, and
the online voting problem, so that for now the list of functions I
explicitly described partially but significantly intersects the list
of those that are needed here, and a complete solution to this would
just be one small step further.
Main page:
On humanity's failures to
steer itself properly