• Llituro [he/him, they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    32·
    7 days ago

    in what sense could ontology possibly be considered a word popularized by palantir?

    and of course, if i can sneak some effort about ontology into c/slop, here’s a long david graeber anthropology paper about ontology and its application in which lens should be employed when studying other people’s cultures. https://davidgraeber.org/wp-content/uploads/2015-Radical-aterity-is-just-another-way-of-saying-reality-A-reply-to-Viveiros-de-Castro.pdf

    edit: the discussion of ontology in philosophy begins at the bottom of page 14

    • Formerlyfarman [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
      15·
      7 days ago

      A few years ago I wanted to learn about ontology and piked an MIT book called generating formal ontologies, or something, it was complete bullshit, it was not about metaphysics but about some sort of book keeping bullshit. Absolute nonsensical garbage. I made it a third in, there was this annoying uncritical lib brain worms tone to it. Horrible book, reinforcing my preconception, that the old moneyed wasps attending those universities are so inbread, they might as well be clones of each other.

      Edit: the book was basically the opposite of what you or any reasonable person understands as ontology. One should learn ontology to be able to tell those categories used in the book are arbitrary, man made, and meaningless outside some very narrow cultural context. It’s like they live in their own little isolated village, with no curiosity or awareness of new ideas.

      these removedes have been using ontology to refer to the management of databases/ bookkeeping for years, even in academic contexts. Probably one of them thought it was a cool sounding word a while ago, and it unfortunately stuck. This pisses me of so much.

      • Philosoraptor [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
        11·
        7 days ago

        Back before the current machine learning AI craze, there was a movement to try to create AI by explicitly programming every possible bit of ordinary world and common sense knowledge into computers. The people who were paid (often quite well) to tell computers things like “if a person is in a room, then their upper half is also in the room” were often called “professional ontologists.”