Have you heard the famous, self-deprecating line attributed to Groucho Marx: “I wouldn’t want to be a member of a country club that would have me as a member”? It’s the ultimate in personal humility.
In contrast, most politicians exhibit all the worst traits of narcissism and ego-centrism. The Clintons are famous for these characteristics, but more recently we’ve seen the sanctimony of New York Governor Spitzer and Detroit Mayor Kilpatrick.
As I watch these people running for a position in Government, I am frequently amazed at the harassment these folks choose to endure. I really question their intelligence, and I usually write it off to their loss of rationality based on their zestful pursuit of the ultimate ego trip — an elected Government official.
I finally realized that best criterion for selecting my candidate: I would only like to vote for a politician if he were smart and humble enough to not run for office.
Hello blogger,
You presented to the reader the following statement:
“I really question their intelligence, and I usually write it off to their loss of rationality based on their zestful pursuit of the ultimate ego trip — an elected Government official.”
While one is entitled to his or her opinion, it would also be critical to have several facts to support your argument.
In the near future, suppose one has a natural language search engine agent that can answer the following question:
“What is the intelligence of Governor Spitzer?”
The noun intelligence is quite important. Intelligence is synonymous with smart. Since every person exhibits a form of intelligence, your query is thus far valid.
A person has-a (n) intelligence. A person has-a-type-of intelligence. Elliot Spitzer is-a Person. Therefore, he-has intelligence and a type-of intelligence. Well, more specifically, we want to know what kind of intelligence he has.
Well we know the following facts:
– He attended Princeton University
– He scored a 1590 (a near perfect score) on the SAT
An agent can deduce from this information that {person(s)} ranges in the upper quartile of intelligence.
Furthermore, assuming the agent has up-to-date retrieval of information on the Web, the agent discovers Spitzer has-a latest news segment. The latest news (Wikipedia) says the following:
“In March 2008, The New York Times reported that he [Spitzer] was a client of a prostitution ring under investigation by the federal government.” (Wikipedia)
The phrase “prostitution ring under investigation by the federal government” should provide the agent a sub query: “What is the intelligence of people who undergo an investigation by the federal government?” A list of people with this specified condition is returned to the agent. The agent infers that it is presented with a contradiction. The people on the list contradict Spitzer. They have intelligences far below Spitzer.
So the question that faces us is how to decipher such difficult information on a corpus of data on the Internet and make opinionated reasons? Furthermore, the agent must understand the contradiction between 1590 and committing an intelligence act in the lower quartile of society. How does the agent know how to respond?
This, my friend, is Web 3.0 (more like Web 20.0), natural language processing, and the Semantic Web.