Marcus, As you may remember, I have conducted a few informal seminars out here in which email and forum conversations were crucial and voluminous. Two of those conversations have metamorphosed into publications. So I think I have passed the criterion of being at least "slightly motivated." Early in the days of the Santa Fe Complex I tried to move email into a wiki format in order to get the group writing up its ideas about Complexity. This generated some very interesting material, but never crossed the bridge into publication. Chatting amongst ourselves is fine, and I enjoy it, but I like to see good ideas developed, organized, and published.
Let me just say that moving email into readable text is harder than it seems. Nick -----Original Message----- From: Friam [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Marcus G. Daniels Sent: Saturday, January 19, 2013 11:40 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [FRIAM] WAS:: Cliques, public, private. IS: Preserving email correspondence On 1/19/13 10:35 AM, Nicholas Thompson wrote: > This material is way too good to be packed down into the midden of old email. I know someone who is a good programmer. He's generally better than the people around him and among other things he has been accused of being purposely uncommunicative. He's smart. He has said things like "If you want to know what's going on, read the commit log and read the source code diffs." Other people felt that he should write high level documents, give talks, and so on. He felt it was not his problem if people were not willing or were not able to bring themselves up to speed. To him, they just would not engage. He was interested in the problem and not in educating people. He had no problem educating himself. There's a similar situation here. A goal a person can have from a conversation is to extract some information from another, as if acquiring an asset. Another goal a person can have is to just have a conversation or argument for its own sake. A slightly motivated person can handle some headers. Marcus ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
