All,
So, today I resigned my tenure and as of 2007 will be living in Santa Fe as of Jan 1 2007. I still have to finish a semester's teaching and get out there, so I wont have a lot of energy to spare before I get out there, but I would like to start thinking about projects.
One project that seems particularly worthy, whose working name is the Purple People Project, seeks to provide a web "dating service" for people or web "chess club" who want to talk to, argue with, share views with, , people who disagree with them on major issues of the day. I imagine a web interface which would help people find one another and then structure thier discussions to keep people away from unproductive discourse or perhaps to guide them toward productive discourse. I think to get it rolling we would need web people, philosophical people, political people. What I would love to think of is some way in which the site could build itself (or with the help of a Universithy professor with a flock of students looking for something to do) by tracking fruitless lines of argument and developing mechanisms for turning people away from them. I have the political arrogance to suppose that if arguments can be kept on point, liberal democrats and moderate republicans will win them. I dont know who would win the 2008 election if we got such a thing going but it wouldnt be Karl Rove.
Has anybody out there had similar thoughts???
Nick
Nicholas Thompson
============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
