Wikenigma – an Encyclopedia of Unknowns | Hacker News Reader

Wikenigma – an Encyclopedia of Unknowns

wikenigma.org.uk

193 pointsjgamman43 comments

Wikenigma – an encyclopedia of scientific questions with no known answers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34181165 - Dec 2022 (11 comments)

Wikenigma is an encyclopedia for topics with unknown answers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32210258 - July 2022 (72 comments)

(Reposts are fine after a year or so; links to past threads are just to satisfy extra-curious readers)

I also posted it 4 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42783625

Ah yes - and a couple others did in the last week, too. I wonder why!

It's a bit of a lottery which instance of a submission ends up 'winning' a frontpage position. The intention is to build some sort of aggregation mechanism that will involve karma sharing in the future. In the meantime, I guess it does at least even out in the long run if one keeps submitting articles (and thanks for doing that!)

I'm glad you're thinking about this. It's always strange to search for a topic, and find a dozen hits, most with one post max, and one which went absolutely viral.

In a world where karma/upvotes/etc actually does contribute to reputation, it seems unfair and arbitrary.

> In a world where karma/upvotes/etc actually does contribute to reputation, it seems unfair and arbitrary.

For the most part I think it doesn’t happen that much on HN. There are maybe a handful of people that I recognize by name because of their volume of comments. But I don’t normally look at or consider how much karma someone has or hasn’t got when I read random comments from random people.

HN took steps specifically to avoid some of the negative effects of karma influencing how comments are perceived by removing the display of how many points each comment has in the discussion under each post.

Usually the only time I click through to someone’s profile specifically to look at their karma is if they said something that seemed purposefully inflammatory and I’m wondering if they have a habit of trolling (and therefore have very low karma), or if it was just a one-off thing that maybe came out wrong or maybe they’re just having a particularly bad day today. Or maybe I’m even just misinterpreting as inflammatory what was not meant like that by them.

But if you do want to know how much karma those that have the most have, since you’re bringing up the topic of karma, there’s also this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders

The karma leaderboard.

> karma/upvotes/etc actually does contribute to reputation

I hope not!

Much less here than on, say, Reddit. But it's not nothing!

I wonder if instead of a number, users are told what their "karmic trend" is.

Like if your last three comments got upvotes, it would say "you're trending good" or something (and vice versa for downvotes). People's monkey brains get too focused on a single number which inevitably gets tied to their identity/reputation, even on a place like HN where it's essentially invisible.

I wouldn't lose a wink if you decided to hide the karma system completely from us HN users, but I'm sure some would.

Hit the random button a few times and every article was bird-related.

Every time I see a bird up close I’m struck by how weird they are, but I didn’t realise they were quite so mysterious.

I must’ve hit the random button 10 times and haven’t seen any bird related mysteries

I wonder why Travelling Salesman Problem is included but not other NP-hard problems.

https://wikenigma.org.uk/content/computer_science/the_ravell...

(The URL really says "ravelling" and not "travelling". Maybe this article was hastily added)

other np-hard problems are not included because you haven't added them to the wiki

To add them to the "wiki", you'd have to be able to edit the wiki. You cannot. I rather wanted to edit the "Liar Paradox" (sic) page, but there doesn't seem to be any way to do so.

rtfm O:-) https://wikenigma.org.uk/info:notes_for_contributors:registr...

Maybe they meant to add the np-complete version, in which case, do you really need more than one?

Does it have an entry for what we don't know we don't know?

https://www.theuncertaintyproject.org/tools/rumsfeld-matrix

TIL there is a name for this.

> In 2002, during a press briefing about the Iraq War, Donald Rumsfeld famously divided information into four categories: known knowns, known unknowns, unknown knowns, and unknown unknowns. These distinctions became the basis for the Rumsfeld Matrix, a decision-making framework that maps and evaluates the various degrees of certainty and uncertainty.

Wiki page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_are_unknown_unknowns

Well dude. We just don't know.

I was thinking about this concept yesterday, in the context of AI automation in the sciences.

It is difficult for anyone in any scientific field to know where the big knowledge gaps are. Yet I can plausibly imagine a method whereby LLMs could identify research gaps, particularly when supported by scientists in the field.

In a near world where human scientists and AI collaborate much more closely on semiautomated scientific knowledge production, finding and filling knowledge gaps might be an approach for guiding work.

I was surprised to find out that we apparently don't have a definitive explanation for how hangovers work: https://wikenigma.org.uk/content/medicine/diseases/g-l/hango...

1400 articles, spanning math to medicine to biology to archeology and more…this is a tiny sip of an ocean of unknowns.

Considering the infinity of knowable facts, and the finite number of facts which are known, any list of unknowns will always be a drop in the proverbial bucket.

well said. the more you know, the more you know what you don't know.

take all knowledge of known things and imagine its a circle, the radius is touching known unknowns.

as known grows, the radius expands and touches more unknowns.

i don't think that will ever end.

I wonder if this might cause the perception coined by 'idiocracy', that people keep being 'dumber'. actually they know relatively the same but its better understood that its really not a lot thats known?

The “random article” link is irresistible

Apparently philosophers don't know what holes are:

> https://wikenigma.org.uk/content/philosophy/holes

That’s funny because the concept of a gap or void as a fundamental part of the universe has been around for thousands of years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_(cosmogony)

Mathematicians, meanwhile, have multiple answers: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ymF1bp-qrjU

Never would have thought Holes getting so complicated.

I think I need classes on Topology and Knots.

I wonder if there is an ethical limit to some categories of knowledge. There are surely some sociological phenomena which are currently unexplained, but could potentially be explained by, say, incredibly invasive monitoring of peoples’ lives, but which we would probably rather remain unexplained than go down that route.

Get a large enough population and you'll be able to get volunteers for any conceivable experiment.

I’m not sure. Imagine you want to answer the research question of how people come to adopt certain beliefs. You can probably answer that robustly by monitoring absolutely all their cultural inputs - including throughout childhood where these inputs likely have high impact, but where consent for such an experiment is likely impossible. Every book they read, every website they visit, every person they listen to. I think if you constrain this experiment to a more reasonable level of information gathering, you’ll miss important details.

You could get permission from the parents to install the recording devices, but until the child is grown up the data could be kept locked away somewhere completely inaccessible. Then when the child is old enough to grant permission you unlock that data for use. This sort of pattern should work for all studies involving children.

Honestly though, most of these kinds of studies would probably just stop at getting permission from the parents.

This is super fun!

But I'm not super clear why it's a site of its own, rather than a list on Wikipedia?

Surely it's a list as serious as:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_misconceptions

Or is there something less objective about it?

The “curator’s rationale” page maybe sheds some light on that, indirectly.

That Wikenigma aims to be about “known unknowns” and igniting curiosity. While Wikipedia is about gathering knowledge (“known knowns”). Possibly.

https://wikenigma.org.uk/curators_rationale

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclopedia

Although Wikipedia also has articles covering known unknowns.

I guess a reason for having Wilenigma is that it’s a place you can go and explore many different known unknowns without getting sucked into articles about known knowns. Possibly.

For example, both Wikenigma and Wikipedia have features for jumping to a random article. If you are looking specifically for known unknowns, it would be much better to use the link for random article on Wikenigma than on Wikipedia.

I am reminded of an animation I one time saw about a guy that was collecting questions. I can’t find it now, but if anyone knows which one I’m thinking of, please link it. I think watching that short animation illustrates a similar kind of idea to what seems to be the idea behind Wikenigma.

Seems like the server is down. Or OP has reached their bandwidth, hence the website not accessible

We just don't know is what I think Feynman was getting at in his criticism of physics teaching and how it tries to leverage the nth layer and n-1th layer to explain actions in the n+1 layer.

so basically one of the articles talks about why there should be an equal amount of matter and antimatter in the universe but in reality we havent been able to find antimatter, is it possible that our entire observable universe is a small area with matter rich concentration and there exists a much much bigger structure of the order of 1 decillion light years where random areas have concentrations of matter and antimatter and we are unfortunately stuck in the area with matter?

That would violate the Cosmological principle - the idea that viewed on a sufficiently large scale, the properties of the universe are the same for all observers. Also the Copernican principle - the idea that our observation point in the universe is pretty average and not overly special.

Of course both of these principles aren't strongly supported by evidence. They are still usually assumed because they keep cosmology sane and verifiable.

This is something that confused me also. I feel like this is a reasonable argument.

My only criticism I guess would be that this is unfalsifiable, so for the time being it's more productive to see if there's any possibility to explain that within the observable universe.

bandwidth limit exceeded :<

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