> hahah. now why, why on earth would i use someone who clearly didnt/doesnt-get-it's limited conception?

Because we're discussing his argument. Traditionally its assumed when you discuss the validity of someone else's argument you take on their definitions for the purpose of discussing the argument (or argue something like: their argument is irrelavent because they define terms differently so it doesn't apply in the situation i care about).

If your position is: "norvig is wrong when you take his words out of context to make them mean something different than what he meant" - all i can say is, yes obviously. Literally no-one disputes that.

> your words have felt dangerously misleading to me in a couple core places, forcing worse-is-better framings onto the scene repeatedly

If you mean my premise that not all people in the world (or to be less hyperbolic, a significant portion) have their incentives aligned with the semantic web, i would say:

A) that's not what the term worse is better means in computers
B) a core premise to an argument is not the same thing as framing.
C) i'm not sure how you can say its misleading. I'm making a claim about the world. The generalized version (that getting humans to all agree on something is like hearding cats) is a fairly popular view point. Like all descriptive claims about the world, it could be true or it could be false. You haven't really provided any evidence or argument that its false. I don't understand what you think is misleading about it unless you think everyone who disagrees with you is being misleading.

Edit: after rereading your post, and in an attempt to be fully fair - you might be referring to the premise that semantic networks need wide adoption before having value. I would still say that that's a premise not a framing. I only support the premise in the context that norvig was talking about originally - some sort of open membership highly distributed knowledge base useful for general search (what i would call the w3c semantic web "vision"). If you talk about semantic networks more generally, than this premise sometimes falls down, which seems to be where you're going with this argument. However i suspect that Norvig would also agree that semantic networks can potentially suceed in different contexts than the specific one he was talking about. I think most people agree with that statement.

> but i see fait accomplis written all over the outlooks i have given & it feels radically confining to me & very uncomfortable.

I don't know what to tell you. The world is an uncomfortable place and sometimes it sucks. Wishing for something doesn't make it so.

The world is changed by people who recognize problems and figure out how to fix them or work around them. You clearly care about the semangic web - that person could be you!

Those who simply ignore the inconvinent don't usually accomplish much.

> what you are seeing is genuine alarm.

With all due respect, if this relatively polite disagreement causes genuine alarm, i would strongly suggest avoiding twitter.

> my read is still that he never had a clue and/or was actively sabotaging a better web.

In some ways this is the most damning statement about the semantic web of all - if all it takes to kill a technology is for a google exec to be somewhat dismissive of it 20 years ago, then its clearly a pretty weak technology.

Hell, google even provided a bunch of the initial funding for wikidata which is arguably one of the few success stories of semantic technologies.

Which is not to say its isn't beautiful. I totally understand why people are enamoured with it. The idea is a wonderful dream; the pretty parts are very pretty. Alas a technology isn't only defined by the beautiful parts.