jeremiem

I agree that conversation is generally not very productive as we often talk past each other.

I would recommend anyone that struggle to discuss divisive or controversial topics to learn and watch Street Epistemology [0], or Compassionate Epistemology [1]. It's comparable to a Socratic dialog.

The basic idea that I got out of it is to unwrap one, and only one, person's beliefs at the time, find their best reason for that belief and see if the reason holds if it was used to believe something else. Repeat with the next best if not. By hiding your opinion on a topic, it's a lot easier to explore someone else's as they shouldn't get defensive or combative.

There are a lot of videos of this kind of interview, my favorite channel: Cordial Curiosity[2].

[0] https://www.streetepistemology.com/ [1] https://compassionateepistemology.com/ [2] https://www.youtube.com/@CordialCuriosity

Close, https://world.openfoodfacts.org/ and https://world.openbeautyfacts.org/, by the same association. Crowd-sourced databases that you can query scanning the barcode using their app.

The quality and availability of the information you can find varies greatly, but it's very easy to contribute. You won't find much that is not already written on the label though.

Studies of split brain patients play a good part in illustrating how little our consciousness is in control in "Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain" by David Eagleman, a book I highly recommend.

I don't think it's impossible to agree on one schema but it's very expensive to do so and requires tools from the study of philosophy.

While I don't work in the domain, the ontologies in the OBO Foundry and all the ones deriving from Basic Formal Ontology[0] have some level of compatibility that make their integration possible. Still far from "one schema to rule them all" but it shows that agreement can be achieved.

There are other initiatives that I'm aware of that could also qualify as a step in the right direction: "e-Government Core Vocabularies" and the "European Materials Modelling Ontology".

I hope and want to believe that, sooner than later, we will have formalized definitions for most practical aspects of our lives.

[0] https://basic-formal-ontology.org/users.html

If I could guarantee you that I wouldn't send anything, would you agree to give me, a stranger, your email password?

Hopefully PureOS on a Librem 5

Your first point is being worked on and there are a few upper ontologies being used. I find BFO [1] quite promising.

I believe that we actually can generalize modelling. We have dictionaries filled with definitions, given enough time and discipline, I don't see why we couldn't make them formal. It's not an engineering problem though.

[1] http://basic-formal-ontology.org/

Sounds a bit like "Death Switch", a short story from "Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives" where our personal algorithms outlive us.

OpenGrok, it's very simple to setup and makes navigating in large codebase easy.