Why? He shared little with the wider community, contributed to mass surveillance with Cyc's government collaborations, and hasn't really done anything of note.
I don't dislike Lenat, but he doesn't fit the commercial value of people who get black bars, he doesn't fit the ideological one, and he doesn't fit the community-benefit one.
Case-based reasoning is VERY old. It shows up prominently in the Catholic tradition of practical ethics, drawing on Aristotelian thought. Of course in a more informal sense, people have been reasoning on a case-by-case basis since time immemorial.
That's not what is meant here by case-based reasoning; CBR instead is an AI method which was prominent in the eighties and nineties where knowledge was represented in a semi-formal text representation and similarity was established by multi-dimensional assiociative indexing. One of the leading figures of the method was Roger Schank.
While futile from a personal and business aspect, it’s certainly valuable and useful otherwise. Maybe that’s implied here as you’re listing contributions, but I wanted to emphasize that it wasn’t a waste outside of that narrow band of futility.
Why do people have to have 'commercial value' to get black bars? Why do people have to pass the ideological police? Why isn't serving as a visible advocate of a certain logical model enough?
I think my bias comes from having started my career in AI on the inference side and having (perhaps not so much long term :) seen Cyc as a shining city on a hill. Lenat certainly established that logical model even if we've since gone onto other things.
I don't dislike Lenat, but he doesn't fit the commercial value of people who get black bars, he doesn't fit the ideological one, and he doesn't fit the community-benefit one.