Hierarchies or Networks?

Posted by Dellu
Jul 24, 2021 at 07:58 AM

Neither is sufficient, nor even the combination.

it enrages me so much when these guys claim to emulate the brain when they design their applications:

- there was a talk of imitating the way the brain maps ideas when mind mapping tools came out first.
- and now, those hyperlinking tools again start to talk about building the second brain.

That is nonsense.

First, we really know little on how the brain contains ideas. It is very complicated issue: and the most attractive of the theories is “associationism” which is almost impossible to model in a digital system.

Here is the fundamental issue with hierarchies: most of knowledge is hierarchal. If you are studying the biological classification of organisms, there is always well build hierarchy. Mind maps might work in that case. But, in most other cases, ideas have no hierarchal relationships. Their relation is different sorts.

Networks are better, but they cannot replace the usual extended, long text.

The fundamental issue with networks: networks connect the linguistic terms (words and phrases). But, the real link is not between the terms; it is between the concepts. A concept map is different from a lexical map. (And, on the practical side, hyperlinks created within apps are usually dysfunctional once they moved out of that app. You need a lot of complicated programming if you want to transfer the hyperlinks created in one map into another one. )

If you want to drive a complicated concept home, you need a traditional long text writing; not a number of hyperlinked small texts.

Assume you are reading a book; say Chomsky