https://jefdemolder.blogspot.com/2020/10/the-end-of-stolenhistoryorg-project.html
This guy says the old website was in a sort of I.A. stuff. I think more on some kind of money-per-data (users) stuff.
(Extracting Data and Selling personal Profiles?)
The end of the stolenhistory.org project
On August 21th, stolenhistory.org has been archived to the Wayback Machine. Instragram and Twitter accounts were also wiped. This happened all of a sudden, without any communication by the administrator "Korben Dallas" before or after the event.
Stolenhistory.org was the best and most active English-speaking platform for history criticism. Many were very disappointed. The event was discussed on different fora. Until now, nobody has first hand information on what happened. "Dreamtime" and some other regular contributors to stolenhistory.org have started a new forum,
stolenhistory.net, on which half of the ancient site has been saved, and on which new threads are being opened.
Many published their articles on stolenhistory.org. The site had about 100.000 monthly pageviews. But nobody knew the real person behind "Korben Dallas", who named himself after a role in the the picture "The fifth element".
On stolenhistory.net a thread was started by "feralimal" on September 25, "Stolen History research, KorbenDallas (KD) focus". Some people have tried to find the real Korben Dallas. Today I read speculations on Didier Capelle of theognose.wordpress.com as possible Korben Dallas. I know Didier Capelle and his work; he is not Korben Dallas. I posted a reaction. I repeat and expand it here.
I think that, using methods of higher historical criticism, it is possible to make clear that stolenhistory.org was a succesful AI-project. I have not the time now to work this out.
I'm looking at:
- The way Korben Dallas entered the scene (a fictional figure only begins to exist when entering the scene) and left the scene (typically just disappearing)
- The quantity, variety, quality of documentation, intensity and very advanced hypotheses of the KD-research, too much for a single human
- The impossible workload when the creative work is combined with the management of such a succesful site
- The inconsistent objective of the site. A person with such advanced ideas in history criticism is interested in discussing with peers with the aim of progress in knowledge. Such a person is not interested in creating a succesful site on which anyone can post his/her arrticles starting from his/her own level in history criticism or fringe science. I even suspect that two project-teams were involved in stolenhistory.org, one team busy with machine learning in the analysis of texts belonging to different sources and the machinal production of possible solutions, and one team experimenting with the interaction between machines and a human public.
- The lack of focus. A real person writing such articles has a strong focus, he/she is going somewhere, the focus always appears even when the person is tired. KD gave the impression of just producing articles, in an effective but carefree way, a bit like the Korben Dallas of the picture. In the same way, had a strong interest in riddles and puzzles, but not really in history as a humanistic discipline.
- The complete failure of the modification of parameters in the last months. KD "was not the same anymore". The software not longer worked properly. I think this has to do with the difficulty to program reasoning combining false chronology with true chronology. It is as if some new team member changed some parameters in the KD-machine, and that it got disrupted.
- The lack of institutionalization. When so many are involved and interested, real humans always start a club. The actual stolenhistory.net is typically human institutionalization, trying to hold and preserve the achievements. Institutionalization was totally absent from stolenhistory.org, I think because a research institute/company was already behind.
Some signals appeared in the press that effectively artificial intelligence is being applied to historical data and research. Fo instance:
History News Network
Analysing history using Artificial Intelligence
12-19-2018
Financial Times
How AI helps historians solve ancient puzzles
June 30, 2020
theinnovationenterprise
How Machine Learning is Mapping History
But AI goes further than that. For instance, on the site of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence I read the following on their Aristo project.
- The Aristo Project aims to build systems that demonstrate a deep understanding of the world, integrating technologies for reading, learning, reasoning, and explanation.
- Multihop Reasoning. Many questions require multiple pieces of information to be combined to arrive at an answer. We are developing new multihop models capable of identifying and combining relevant facts to answer such questions.
- Explanation. An intelligent system should not only answer questions correctly, but also be able to explain why its answers are correct. Such a capability is essential for practical acceptance of AI technology. It is also essential for the broader goals of communicating knowledge to a user, and receiving correction from the user when the system's answer is wrong.
The Allen Institute has also a project on AI embedded in human situations.
I do not say that the Allen Institute was behind the stolenhistory.org project, but it seems to me that "Korben Dallas" was indeed an Aristo-like machine. We can congratulate the AI-team for this succesful project. Sure, "Korben Dallas" exagerrated with his orphan trains and the goddess Artemis and her factories for the production of humans, but his daring hypotheses were neverthelesse close to the truth about the gods and the origins of humans. Also on the level of creating interaction between algorithms and humans the project was very succesful. The biggest problem that emerged from the succesful experiment is that the human discussions lag far behind the advanced hypotheses. Machine learning is one thing, human learning another.
STOLENHISTORY.ORG / STOLENHISTORY.NET COMPARISON
https://hypestat.com/info/stolenhistory.org
15.9K daily visitors
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Verify your site's metrics.
Daily Unique Visitors:15,877Monthly Visits:500,126Pages per Visitor:35.00Daily Pageviews:555,690
How much would stolenhistory.org make?
Daily Revenue:$6,188.93Monthly Revenue:$185,667.90Yearly Revenue:$2,258,959.45*All earnings values are estimates only.
Server IP:
199.250.212.84ASN:AS22611 ISP:InMotion Hosting, Inc. Server Location:Los Angeles
California, CA
90045
United States, US
https://hypestat.com/info/stolenhistory.net
stolenhistory.net Traffic Summary
1.5K daily visitors
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Verify your site's metrics.
Daily Unique Visitors:1,479Monthly Visits:46,589Pages per Visitor:10.00Daily Pageviews:14,790
How much would stolenhistory.net make?
Daily Revenue:$60.34Monthly Revenue:$1,810.20Yearly Revenue:$22,024.10*All earnings values are estimates only.
Server IP:
136.144.41.142ASN:AS49981 ISP:WorldStream B.V. Server Location:San Francisco
California, CA
94119
United States, US