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Crowd-Sourced Experiment To Map All Human Skills

samzenpus posted 2 days ago | from the what-can-you-do? dept.

Social Networks 70

spadadot writes French-based startup has just launched a website that will let you add your skills to a comprehensive map of human skills. As quoted from their website "We aim to build the largest, most accurate, multilingual skills database ever made, by allowing a diverse and skillful community to contribute their individual skills to the global map." The ontology is simple: skills can have zero or more sub-skills. Every new skill is available in all supported languages (only English and French at the moment). The crowdsourced data is free for non-commercial use."

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I know a few skills (0)

Anonymous Coward | 2 days ago | (#48373609)

Masturbation, that's a skill. Finding good porn, another skill.

Re: I know a few skills (0)

Anonymous Coward | 2 days ago | (#48373683)

Off handed, no hands, two handed,

So many skills

Re:I know a few skills (0)

Anonymous Coward | 2 days ago | (#48374455)

And don't forget your other skill: TMI.

i feel S.P.E.C.I.A.L. (1)

zlives (2009072) | 2 days ago | (#48373611)

i like that system best.

My skill is first post! (-1)

Anonymous Coward | 2 days ago | (#48373625)

also frosty piss

list (0)

Anonymous Coward | 2 days ago | (#48373665)

Is "tomfoolery" on the list yet?

I have a very specific set of skills. (4, Funny)

netsavior (627338) | 2 days ago | (#48373675)

they make me a nightmare for people like you.

Re:I have a very specific set of skills. (0)

Anonymous Coward | yesterday | (#48375829)

Are you the Bob from accounting, by any change?

Re:I have a very specific set of skills. (0)

Anonymous Coward | yesterday | (#48375971)

Good luck.

I'm behind seven proxies.

Re:I have a very specific set of skills. (0)

Anonymous Coward | yesterday | (#48377789)

Are you the High Lord of Rick Rolling or the Emperor of Korean Potbellied Pig Pron? I have nightmares about both.

Triangle tetrahedron intersections (1)

140Mandak262Jamuna (970587) | 2 days ago | (#48373689)

I am very good at this. So good, someone is actually paying me real good money, actual money with which you could buy other stuff, for this obscure skill. This is a great country, or what!

Re: Triangle tetrahedron intersections (0)

Anonymous Coward | yesterday | (#48375263)

Our agents will be rappelling through your windows within the hour. But you already knew that.

True Genius: (1)

Hartree (191324) | 2 days ago | (#48373693)

They will very soon have a comprehensive database of the very best automated troll entry coding skillsets that GNAA and other such groups can muster.

Or didn't they get the memo that Hank the Angry Drunken Dwarf won man of the year over a decade ago?

Nice try but ... (0)

Anonymous Coward | 2 days ago | (#48373699)

I'm not convinced that *all* human skills can be categorized in a tree structure. Shouldn't this be some sort of graph?

Also "Programming Languages" being divided between interpreted or compiled languages might have been a meaningful distinction back when lexical versus dynamic scope was a thing, but today anything worth using has a spec that can be implemented however you like. Somehow I think this start doesn't bode well.

Re:Nice try but ... (1)

peragrin (659227) | 2 days ago | (#48374011)

Why not Skill trees work for video games.

All we need is a stat tree. you have
60 leg strength,
50 upper body strength
65 endurance
5 Mental toughness
95 ego

Re:Nice try but ... (1)

radtea (464814) | 2 days ago | (#48374425)

I'm not convinced that *all* human skills can be categorized in a tree structure. Shouldn't this be some sort of graph?

More likely multiple graphs, since "skills" are abstract categories, and abstract categories are made things that ever knowing subject creates for themselves, with only approximate overlap between them. So what I mean by "interpreted language" and what you mean by "interpreted language" are going to overlap substantially, but we will draw the edges of our attention differently. Some borderline cases you will call "interpreted" and I won't, and vice versa.

For example: are just-in-time compiled languages interpreted or not? There are perfectly legitimate ways of drawing the edges of our attention that include them and others--equally legitimate--that exclude them.

The problem with all such attempts as this is they naively and wrongly assume that the world, which is necessarily some particular way, must also be divided into uniquely determined, rather than usefully constrained, abstract categories by knowing subjects. This is simply not the case, and we have endless examples demonstrating it.

Classical and Newtonian mechanics, although mathematically equivalent, use different and incompatible abstract schemes (one says the principle of least action causes motion, the other Newton's laws.) And so on. 99% of the time we are dealing with interior cases where such distinctions don't matter, but then we hit some weird edge case (quantum mechanics in the case of classical vs Newtonian physics) where one of them suddenly looks completely different from the other, and naive people say, "OK then, the world is really this way" (where "this way" means, "is organized uniquely according to this abstract scheme"). But it isn't: abstractions are ways we describe the world to ourselves as knowing subjects. They are objective in the sense that they arise out of the causal relationships that knowing subjects have with the rest of reality, but to be an object requires a subject (and to be a subject requires an object: there is no view of no-where.) Different subjects will divide up the same objective reality in slightly different ways.

Re:Nice try but ... (1)

Vintermann (400722) | yesterday | (#48376377)

More likely multiple graphs, since "skills" are abstract categories, and abstract categories are made things that ever knowing subject creates for themselves, with only approximate overlap between them. So what I mean by "interpreted language" and what you mean by "interpreted language" are going to overlap substantially, but we will draw the edges of our attention differently. Some borderline cases you will call "interpreted" and I won't, and vice versa.

That's a problem ten times more subtle than the problems they already have. I wanted to see if they had the skill "four-part choral harmonisation". It's art, right? But right away there's a problem. Performing music is a performing art, but writing music is not a performing art. They put composition under art-performing art-music-composition, and what's under composition?

Only one thing. Score reading. Which is obviously not a more specific skill of composition.

Re:Nice try but ... (2)

skids (119237) | yesterday | (#48375599)

I'd make a similar complaint, but the objective of this project is obviously just to harvest a base of credentials. It's such a bad idea on the surface when they could just mine wikipedia, that I don;t believe for a second they are serious about the product.

trolling on slashdot (0)

Anonymous Coward | 2 days ago | (#48373797)

Is that one of them?

Re:trolling on slashdot (1)

RandomAdam (1837998) | 2 days ago | (#48374399)

I suppose that depends on the nature of the trolling; is this a sub-skill of general trolling. Or is is more of a parallel skill to general trolling. I know trolling IRL is a different skill then trolling "on the internet".

translation problems (0)

Anonymous Coward | 2 days ago | (#48373801)

my text:
"I have a bit of trouble with Architecture being under Art."

translation:
"I have a bit of trouble with being white Architecture under Art."

lolwut.

waiting for the trolls (1)

NotInHere (3654617) | 2 days ago | (#48373807)

does the 4chan crowd know about this?

Re:waiting for the trolls (0)

Anonymous Coward | 2 days ago | (#48373999)

they do now

 

Re:waiting for the trolls (0)

Anonymous Coward | 2 days ago | (#48374585)

I predict a disproportionate number of people with "Nunchuck Skills", which they do have listed. Commence troll....

Rule 34 (1)

OzPeter (195038) | 2 days ago | (#48373823)

That is going to make for a very large and weird collection of skills.

Re:Rule 34 (1)

Mikkeles (698461) | 2 days ago | (#48374095)

I hope that they include "Le Petomane" [wikipedia.org] , who could fart "La Marseillaise" and outdrew Sarah Bernhardt!

Re:Rule 34 (1)

wonkey_monkey (2592601) | yesterday | (#48376427)

and outdrew Sarah Bernhardt!

Wow. Life was tough in frontier fin-de-siècle Paris, huh?

odd, couldnt find murder, torture, or rape. (0)

Anonymous Coward | 2 days ago | (#48373853)

odd, couldnt find murder, torture, or rape.

Re:odd, couldnt find murder, torture, or rape. (0)

Anonymous Coward | 2 days ago | (#48374495)

Maybe you weren't looking in the right place: they're all under "beta".

neat idea, execution seems doomed to failure (0)

Anonymous Coward | 2 days ago | (#48373855)

i see all sorts of problems with this, namely that there are very blurry lines between skills and disciplines (or "jobs").

and also, it seems that you would need to build from the grain up, not the way they're doing it. tons of discrete skills overlap their higher level classes, so do you add the same skill all over the place?? i think the structure is not correct for the model.

Re:neat idea, execution seems doomed to failure (2)

xaotikdesigns (2662531) | 2 days ago | (#48373947)

Exactly. Is 3d design an "art" or a "technology" skill?

Re:neat idea, execution seems doomed to failure (1)

khallow (566160) | yesterday | (#48376147)

Exactly. Is 3d design an "art" or a "technology" skill?

Yes.

Re:neat idea, execution seems doomed to failure (1)

Chelloveck (14643) | yesterday | (#48378185)

I think the whole project is a performance art piece. It seems perfectly designed to stoke the biggest taxonomic flame war that has ever been seen since the day the MP3 "genre" tag was introduced.

I can juggle 5 at a time (1)

Anonymous Coward | 2 days ago | (#48373885)

While composing a pstt Slahsot

oh shit

Well I can do 3.

Missing "Life" Skills (2)

Rambo Tribble (1273454) | 2 days ago | (#48373927)

Shaving, cooking, gardening, driving and a vast host of other life skills seem totally off the radar here. Arguably, these skills are more important to an individuals existence than most of the ones being considered.

Re:Missing "Life" Skills (0)

Anonymous Coward | 2 days ago | (#48374123)

So add them?

Re:Missing "Life" Skills (1)

puzzled_decoy (3900563) | 2 days ago | (#48374257)

They seem to have those organized under "technicals"

Re:Missing "Life" Skills (1)

Chris Mattern (191822) | 2 days ago | (#48374269)

I think those would go into the "Technicals" category, which seems to be their catchall "Other" category.

Re:Missing "Life" SkillsSo add them? (1)

Chris Mattern (191822) | 2 days ago | (#48374337)

Some of those are in here. Shaving and gardening I don't see, but there is Technical-->Kitchen. And there is Technical-->Wheel vehicule[sic] handling-->Land vehicles-->Car driving. Which is then helpfully subclassified into Volvo, Ford, Chrysler, General Motors and Subaru, because of course you have to retrain before you change car brands. And the world's largest car manufacturer (Toyota) doesn't rate a mention.

Re:Missing "Life" SkillsSo add them? (1)

Chris Mattern (191822) | 2 days ago | (#48374369)

Actually, for shaving, there is Technicals-->Beauty-->Body Care-->hair removal. And for gardening, there's Technicals-->Agriculture-->Floriculture-->Gardening

Re:Missing "Life" SkillsSo add them? (1)

gl4ss (559668) | yesterday | (#48375201)

well, I think it's a ploy by french unions.
not onions, but labor unions.

only french labor unions could come up with something as stupid as this, to prove why individual shouldn't be fired or why the employer shouldn't expect their permanent employee to be able to drive a subaru if he can only drive a citroen.

neuroscience is a better approach (1)

happyjack27 (1219574) | 2 days ago | (#48373937)

better way both to organize and map skillsets is through understanding how the brain works and data crunching differences.

yo (0)

Anonymous Coward | 2 days ago | (#48373957)

Every rapper and wannabe baller ever: "I gots the skills."

We're sorry. No skills detected. Please submit yourself to a euthanization clinic.

Obviously Crowdsourcing an RPG System (2)

Fire_Wraith (1460385) | 2 days ago | (#48374027)

Comprehensive list of skills, in multiple languages, free to use for non-commercial purposes... So will the RPG they're making with this be a purely skill based system, or will it be tied to attributes and levels? Will there be perks available?

Fails the "internet is abou porn" test (0)

Anonymous Coward | 2 days ago | (#48374173)

Where do sex workers fit in? "Performing arts"? I would add it myself, but IANASW....

How do you make an anonymous email account? (0)

Anonymous Coward | 2 days ago | (#48374179)

The skill tree is desparately lacking in the intensive field of Masturbation and Masturbation-related activities.

In other news... (0)

Anonymous Coward | 2 days ago | (#48374197)

largest arbitrary sub-list of a near infinite list will be crowdsourced.

Many obscure never before mentioned items included.
Many important items left off.
Much self flagellation had by those in charge. ... and it is done in DIFFERENT LANGUAGES!!!1111 OMG (just to increase duplication, misunderstanding and general uselessness)

where have all the real articles gone?

With no oversight or confirmation?.. Useless (0)

Anonymous Coward | 2 days ago | (#48374213)

Great, are people being trusted to report what they think are real skills? What could go wrong?!...

1) first slashdot post (0)

Anonymous Coward | 2 days ago | (#48374215)

Not that I achieved it yet but:

1) first slashdot post
2) get modded down on slashdot
3) get modded up on slashdot
4) post anonymous coward on slashdot
5) get modded funny for serious comment on slashdot
6) waste time at work
7) waste time on Slashdot
8) Check on slashdot status before waking on wife in the morning

Data wants to be free! (1)

Half-pint HAL (718102) | 2 days ago | (#48374307)

The crowdsourced data is free for non-commercial use.

Yes, but that makes it "free as in beer", not "free as in data-wants-to-be".

I can see practically no useful non-commercial purpose for such data, as the only sensible use for it is in recruitment, which is a decidedly non-non-commercial use.

As it's a startup, I'm assuming they're aiming to make a profit which means they want to sell the data to firms in and around the recruitment sector. And they want the public to do lots and lots of unpaid work so that they can datamine lots of data that no-one else will be able to work with. I'm guessing they don't want a single "correct" tree, but will be explicitly looking for the various repetitions and redundancies, so that they can map out equivalences both across languages and within languages. That data will be used to inform automated CV readers and datamine applicant databases and job databases not just by exact keyword matches, but by related matches.

It sounds like a brilliant machine learning project, but it relies on the public donating millions of man-hours to a for-profit company, with no direct benefit to the donors.

Not complete (0)

Anonymous Coward | 2 days ago | (#48374491)

Not on the list: map all human skills.

Wrong structure (4, Insightful)

swillden (191260) | 2 days ago | (#48374765)

They're trying to model a database of human skills as a hierarchy. That's the most common sort of categorization system we design, because it's simple and logical, but there are lots of things that simply don't fit such a model. Arguably, it's not even a particularly natural model for humans since our internal category systems are generally prototype-based [wikipedia.org] .

But in this case, the real problem is that whatever clear divisions you try to define to segregate skills into classes will be essentially arbitrary. Skills shade into one another based on various common elements. Some pairs of skills are deeply similar because they involve the same sorts of processes, so a person who knows one can easily learn the other even if they're used in completely different contexts, so the taxonomy as-is will incorrectly separate them. Ideally, you really want a skill map that identifies skills that have high degrees of similarity, and between which people can transition easily, regardless of context (I suppose I'm presuming an application of the map which may not be intended, but it seems like a pretty darned valuable application).

There are also real issues of granularity. Take C++ programming... you can be a competent programmer without knowing anything about template metaprogramming, and you can be an expert metaprogrammer without being able to write useful code. Think about it for a moment and you can come up with a hundred examples of sub-skills for any skill. Of course, you can just decide to arbitrarily cut it off at a particular level, and sometimes that level is obvious... but I have a strong suspicion that different people will disagree on the where those "obvious" cut-offs are.

Building the data up the ad-hoc way they're going about it is going to lead to lots of other strangenesses. For example, right now under "Technology" there are three categories "Computer Science", "Aerospace" and "Engineering". Umm, what? We can argue about whether or not software engineers are real engineers, but aerospace engineers definitely are. Do those three things really belong at the same level? Clearly not, and no individual taxonomist would put them there. I hope they have some way for the crowd (or someone) to restructure or the inevitably-flawed and inconsistent hierarchical taxonomy is also going to be silly.

I'm not saying that their idea is impossible, I'm saying that it doesn't fit within a structure of classical categories. Instead it should be modeled as a graph, with multiple relationships between nodes, and the edges labeled to indicate the nature of the relationship. Of course, this will make it impossible to find a skill in the graph except by searching, but that's going to be the case anyway. Except in the most obvious cases people won't know which branches of the tree to follow to find a given skill, and if you're going to start by searching anyway a graph facilitates finding what you want, because you can search for something related and then from there navigate to precisely what you wanted (assuming it's present and properly-connected).

I think there'd also be a lot of value in jump-starting (or perhaps refining) crowd-sourced data with automated analysis and clustering, derived from relevant documents. But the approach to collecting and building the data is less important than getting the data model right.

Re:Wrong structure (0)

Anonymous Coward | yesterday | (#48377691)

A Graph is definitely the way to go on this.
Surely it would be better if people contributed this information to the freebase project, where skills could be positioned in context of many other types of entities (e.g. people, professions etc..)

Re:Wrong structure (0)

Anonymous Coward | yesterday | (#48380445)

Human Factors is sometimes classified as engineering and sometimes classified as aerospace and sometimes classified as psychology.
I think I just broke it.

Re:Wrong structure (1)

swillden (191260) | yesterday | (#48380875)

Human Factors is sometimes classified as engineering and sometimes classified as aerospace and sometimes classified as psychology. I think I just broke it.

It's very easy to break.

Re:Wrong structure (1)

Hognoxious (631665) | 6 hours ago | (#48384351)

Human Factors is sometimes classified as engineering and sometimes classified as aerospace

No it isn't.

Re:Wrong structure (1)

Bite The Pillow (3087109) | 13 hours ago | (#48383341)

Easier to tear down than to build. Care to help?

Re:Wrong structure (1)

swillden (191260) | 2 hours ago | (#48385157)

Easier to tear down than to build. Care to help?

I did. I suggested that they should switch to a general graph rather than a hierarchy, explained why a hierarchy is the wrong structure, and proposed that the process of building the map could be accelerated with machine learning techniques.

The ultimate skill tree (0)

Anonymous Coward | 2 days ago | (#48374963)

I just can't wait for this tree to get incorporated into a MMORPG so I can grind away to master real human skills without actually learning those skills.

Tricky headlines lately (1)

Kevin Fishburne (1296859) | yesterday | (#48375077)

I must be losing it, as earlier today I interpreted at first glance "Study Shows How Humans Can Echolocate" as "Study Shows How Humans Can Eat Chocolate" and now "Crowd-Sourced Experiment To Map All Human Skills" as "Crowd-Sourced Experiment To Map All Human Skulls". Haven't even cracked my first beer yet...maybe that's the problem.

nunchucks, computer hacking... (0)

Anonymous Coward | yesterday | (#48375921)

girls like guys with a lot of SKILLS

Blank page (1)

Hognoxious (631665) | yesterday | (#48375995)

All I see is a blank page. Is having your server slashdotted a skill?

Litterature [sic] (0)

Anonymous Coward | yesterday | (#48376205)

It's ironic that spelling is problematic in the one area where it should matter most .

Wrong data structure (1)

ka9dgx (72702) | yesterday | (#48377025)

They need to fork Wikipedia, and add some directed tree flags to it. Skill META can be considered to belong to multiple parent categories, and has multiple meanings because of the vagaries of language META.

Any attempt to shoe-horn this into a tree is going to fail. Oh... and their search function is dead.

skillz (0)

Anonymous Coward | yesterday | (#48377677)

I'd like to add my bow hunting skills, computer hacking skills, nun-chuck skills,...Gosh!

Who gets to define what a "skill" is? (1)

mark-t (151149) | yesterday | (#48377873)

Because as far as I can tell, a skill can quite literally be anything that people can do... which I'd guess is going to be an infinitely large set, and any list they come up with will never be exhaustive... at best only complete for all practical purposes.

Re:Who gets to define what a "skill" is? (1)

Cederic (9623) | yesterday | (#48380735)

Yeah. They need 'add random shite to fucked up online skills db' skills, followed by 'add plausible sounding random shite to fucked up online skills db' followed by 'invent new adjectives to describe the way in which I'm adding random shite to fucked up online skills db'.

The current classification system is so fucked already that it's doomed from the outset.

Good idea - bad ontology (1)

frank_adrian314159 (469671) | yesterday | (#48381041)

The top level of their ontology names categories in Science & Technology, Sports, Social Sciences, Arts, Business, and "Technicals" and claims that "all skills" come under this tree. Well, I can name a node "everything", put everything under that and say that "all skills" come under that tree, too. It doesn't really make the classification useful.

So, what I see here are idiots who think that crowd sourcing ontologies work. Note - it doesn't. At least not very well.

LOC Classifications? (0)

Anonymous Coward | yesterday | (#48382523)

The Library of Congress Classification system might be a good place to start. In fact, isn't it designed specifically to include all subjects which anyone might write about? Simply remove the categories which aren't skills. Which ones are those?

Or, the dictionary. Every noun (object) and action verb involves a skill.

I'm curious to see where this goes.

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