Why not discard network for hierarchy? #

The tripping points of false simplicity #

Diminished truthiness #

You do not have a single access point to the rest of the world. You have a TV, a phone, the mail, the internet, and all of your friends, family members, and the strangers you will brush up against.

No datapoint is any less rich.

Culling data #

Not all of the information will fit in a hierarchy. To make networked data fit, some data pieces will need to be removed. 

Vast swaths of connectome will be removed, and that’s where the bulk of context resides.

Invalidated without a fix #

If an aspect of a particular network requires two things from two separate categories in a hierarchy to be set a certain way for the key aspect to work, the best case is heavily annotated hierarchies. The worst case is that you have a false negative solution.

Nonsensical exclusion #

What doesn’t fit will be excluded, regardless of whether or not it exists and is in any way touched by the exclusion.

Consider rain in a place where it is known doesn’t get rain. To fit a an architecture trusted more than the experiencers, first the label is thrown out. Rain doesn’t happen here, so the water pouring from the sky isn’t rain. The experience doesn’t fit other labels, so it must not exist. It’s a figment of imagination, and if too many people clamor about it, we’ve got a serious problem with mass hysteria.