CSH: Rich just asked the $64,000 question: How can I turn my dissertation discovery into value.

Rich: You can use that theory in your writing, correct? A good writer uses words to create a feeling. If you could analyze the best books, songs, and movies, and discover which propositions are correlated to which emotions, then you might be able to come up with a list of bewitching phrases—that you could then either sell or use to advertise your own content. Or simply offer it up for free, make it the content of your blog: “The phrase p is 98.2% effective at producing desire for object a in black females between 8 and 12.”

CSH: That’s probably the highest output you could get from my dissertation topic, which is how objective reality is constituted by the subject–predicate relation. Sadly. Using it for big data analysis. I have a friend who just wrote a paper describing how a program could scan all the sheet music on the Internet to discover a emotional vocabulary of chord progressions. Chord progressions, along with lyrics and melody, provide the meaning of music. Chord progressions are printed in tandem with lyrics. We already have ontologies for grouping and connecting the meanings of words. Pandora lets you choose your preference for instruments and styles. But aside from choice there’s discovery involved. We currently don’t know which chord progressions we (unconsciously) choose to represent and create which emotions. Is there really a vocabulary of chord changes expressing the emotions of the words we tie to them? If so, we could create a Pandora for chord changes.

That’s the business application. But this guy—he has no interest in creating a business. He loves research—into the methods for discovery useful for the current “inference revolution” in computer science. We already have information; what is needed is its inter-connection in propositional inference: if p then q. Searching and connection in this way, the human-thinking way, is the next step.

I think I have that problem. It’s fear, but I like to put it in this noble way: I like tinkering with concepts and paradigms but I have no interest in making money from this. My excuse? How is this information being monetized currently? In advertising—in infecting people with hunger and feelings of need, of incompletion, of unhappiness.

Rich: I think a lot of people, for example in music, have talent for providing a value but not for figuring out a way to capitalize on that value. A lot of people are good musicians, and they have no idea how to translate those ideas into something that could actually sustain them. I think that’s probably 50% of the battle. Making those ideas into something digestible for the average person, and marketing them. Creating a product. For your dissertation topic: if you could find a use for it in the realization of the information semantics, you could consult authors or editors with your program.