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Tuesday, December 03, 2002

A quick note on the whole "truth maintenance" business:

In yesterday's post I looked at the festering sewer of doublespeak that is the IAO vision statement. As you might recall I was particularly disturbed by the phrase "story telling, change detection, and truth maintenance." Well, apparently I was displaying my computer-science knowledge deficiency (there goes my backup career as a science fiction writer!). Reader Pat Moeller clarifies:

"Truth maintenance, storytelling, and change detection" are considerably less sinister than they sound- they're AI terms for being able to discriminate between real and false information, deciding which conclusions to throw out due to conflicting information, being able to create a coherent narrative from incomplete information, etc. It was kinda dumb of them to use them in a forum where non-AI or computer science types would be looking at them.

I appreciate the explanation and I agree--it was dumb. But if the IAO wanted people to understand their web site, they (a) wouldn't use such specific jargon and (b) would reread The Elements of Style.

posted by Mikhaela Reid at 5:54 PM

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