watchdog.net

Reddit co-founder Aaron Swartz is tired of tussling with federal agencies over Freedom of Information Act requests, and he wants Obama's CTO to put public government data online for all to see. "We've had to do some crazy stuff to get data out of the government," says Swartz, who also runs Watchdog.net, a hub for political data and activism. "The average programmer, the first time they have to call up a government agency, [they find] it's not worth it.”
Swartz goes even further, proposing a national project to scan the millions of paper documents that live in the National Archives, Library of Congress, and other repositories"a massive program that would dwarf Google's effort to scan library books. "Imagine if we had a public process to take this and put it online"not just for one company, Google, but for the public at large," he says.
I posted thedailybeast article on reddit and picked up 427 points and 83 comments.

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Comments


Going back to James, in pragmatism its spoken truth is not ready-made, but jointly we and reality "make" truth. This idea has two senses, one which is often attributed to William James and F.C.S. Schiller, and another that is more widely accepted by in pragmatism: (1) truth is mutable, and (2) truth is relative to a conceptual scheme.
(1) Mutability of truth
One major difference within pragmatism about the definition of 'truth' is the question of whether beliefs can pass from being true to being untrue and back. For James, beliefs are not true until they have been made true by verification. James believed propositions become true over the long term through proving their utility in a person's specific situation. The opposite of this process is not falsification, but rather a belief ceasing to be a "live option." F.C.S. Schiller, on the other hand, very clearly asserted that beliefs could pass into and problems. If I want to know how to return home safely, the true answer will be whatever is useful to solving that problem. Later on, when faced with a different problem, what I came to believe when faced with the earlier problem may now be false. As my problems change and as the most useful way to solve a problem shifts, so does the property of truth.
Data.

But, imho, this item is not about the metaphysics of truth - it is about raw uninterperted data. It is about making the raw data generated by the government accessible to ordinary people. Anybody can filter and project the data in various tables and graphs - but there should be a common unfiltered data source.







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