
Who Invented Email? Just Ask…Noam Chomsky - wpinbacker
http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/06/noam-chomsky-email
======
DanielBMarkham
I'm flagging this, although I have mixed feelings about doing it. I think it
might be fine as a blog article, but from Wired it just looks too much like
pandering.

Sounds too much like "<PROVOCATIVE NERD-BAIT QUESTION X> Commented on by
<FAMOUS UNRELATED PERSON WHO IS ALSO PROVOCATIVE>" It's just too easy to kick
out dozens of these things.

Since it's the weekend, here's a few samples to show you what I mean (all of
this is made up, of course)

"Functional Programming Not Worth Learning Says Al Gore"

"Paul Krugman Discloses His Favorite Unix Editor"

"Bush Reveals His Opinion on Advanced SEO Techniques"

"Lunar Colony Better Than Mars Mission: Michael Moore"

"James Cameron on Why Higgs Boson is Important"

You could do this all day. Lots of fluff and food for chitchat, nothing much
useful.

~~~
KC8ZKF
Except that Chomsky is not completely unrelated, as your examples are.
Ayyadurai is a colleague of Chomsky. Ayyadurai was a student of Chomsky close
to to the time in question. Ayyadurai's claim centers around the semantics of
the term "email", an area of expertise for Chomsky.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
I usually don't deep-dive into threads, but I think my comment about flagging
and your reply deserves an explanation.

Take a look at the comments on this article. Most of them are about Chomsky as
a provocative person and how it relates to the question of email origins, not
the issue itself. Famous-Provocative-Person-X wades into any discussion and
suddenly we're off into the weeds. That's true whether you can draw a link or
not. The issue of a link is irrelevant, at least as far as I can tell so far
from the comments. (I'd argue that any _real_ story, as opposed to the made up
ones I invented, would have some kind of link like this. Otherwise the game
would just be too obvious)

The point being I flag things that generate lots of off-topic, emotionally-
laden comment-noise. I might have gotten a little flag-happy with this
article. Don't know. Been wrong lots of times before. Quite honestly I grow
tired of seeing any famous person or brand name on HN. It's almost always an
indication of time-wasting nonsense ahead.

~~~
logjam
> Quite honestly I grow tired of seeing any famous person or brand name on HN.
> It's almost always an indication of time-wasting nonsense ahead.

Quite honestly your standards seem wildly inconsistent:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4113928>

Not that the standards of the rest of us are always consistent, but it's
interesting to reflect on why linguist Chomsky on a tech/semantic subject
might trigger one emotional reaction while Reagan advising on love triggers
another....all here on a tech blog, eh?

~~~
DanielBMarkham
The comment I made was about the value of historical people writing serial
letters instead of just reading little one-of-a-kind snippets. But you are
right. If I remember that set of comments correctly, it quickly wandered off
into useless land as well.

If you'd like, happy to go back and flag it.

I'd like to view my responses as being consistent, but I know too much about
how we all are screwed up to buy into my own bullshit. In my defense I believe
my goal with that comment was to encourage people to read more history in
long-form from the participants themselves. At least I think that's what I was
doing. I know I went back and rewrote it a couple of times to make sure I
wasn't wading into hero-worship, gossip, or partisan stuff.

I'm not that big of a Reagan fan. I'd view him in the top 1/3rd or so of
presidents in the last century, but that's mostly because of his skills as a
communicator and his ability to practice retail politics. Seems like the
politicians that spend years doing some kind of face-to-face work like Reagan
(working for GE and as governor) or Clinton (as governor) end up being at
least more interesting as historical figures than the rest of them. Chomsky I
have very little opinion about. He seems to like using his understanding of
the philosophy of language to make political points. That's interesting to me
as far as it goes. Hell, I'd love to talk philosophy of language, but I'm not
sure that has anything to do with anything as far as what we're talking about.
If anything, Chomsky to me seems one of those people who is still buying into
his own bullshit -- but what do I know? As a famous person once said, a man
has to know his limitations.

Damned internet. :)

------
yummyfajitas
Chomsky arguing semantics. He's a linguist, he has his hobbies. Why do the
rest of us care?

This link is quite relevant:
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/2as/diseased_thinking_dissolving_que...](http://lesswrong.com/lw/2as/diseased_thinking_dissolving_questions_about/)

~~~
sashahart
Chomsky is being a polemicist, which has always been his greatest skill.

He has been off on politics rather than linguistics for some time now. E.g.
check out <http://www.chomsky.info/articles.htm> (this is a similar pattern to
many old scientists)

~~~
dalke
Your "many old scientists" parenthetical comment neglects several strong
biases. You've likely never heard of most of the old scientists who don't get
into politics because you don't know about their work at all. Older people
tend to be more interested in politics than younger. It's hard to be
trained/have experience in one field and then switch to another, so few young
scientists would also be known for their politics. (For example, Margaret
Thatcher's research chemistry impact is much less well known than her
political impact.)

And yet, Chomsky is one of those few, having become one of the leading
opponents to the Vietnam War while in his late 30s - as your link itself
implies - and so doesn't fall under the premise of your comment.

~~~
sashahart
You don't seem to understand what I said.

Dawkins is another example of the old scientist pattern - many successful and
famous scientists do the work they're academically known for early, then shift
into topics outside of their original area. It's quite natural.

The link was from fans of Chomsky's and simply illustrates that he has shifted
his attention away from linguistics for many decades now. This is not uncommon
in science and it isn't some kind of slam on Chomsky.

~~~
dalke
But Chomsky didn't change when he was old. He became well-known for his
politics when he was in his 30s. Dawkins was 35 when his "The Selfish Gene"
was published, and 45 when "The Blind Watchmaker" was published. Both are
involved in areas that interested them when they were under 40 years old.

My point is that neither Chomsky (and now neither Dawkins) fits your
description ... unless you say that people 30-40 of age are already old?

My other point is that most successful scientists _don't_ shift into topics
drastically outside their interests when they were young. Dirac? No. Erdős?
No. Barbara McClintock? No. Von Braun? No. Karl Sharpless? No. Jocelyn Bell
Burnell? No. Just take the list of Nobel prize winners for science and see how
few of them got into politics later in life, or for that matter moved into
topics markedly outside of their original area.

Yes, of course some do. But car dealership owners, and chefs (Samak
Sundaravej, PM of Thailand, was a television chef for 7 years), and priests
and singers also get into politics. So my last point was that there's nothing
of note about a few scientists getting into politics as they get older,
because people of all sorts of different fields go into politics as they get
older.

Hence, my comment that there are strong biases which affect your parenthetical
observation.

~~~
sashahart
And Dawkins was probably an atheist when he was young too. So what?

I have never made a generalized claim about all scientists so you are beating
a straw man. I have mentioned a certain pattern which you will see recurring
if you have any significant awareness of the famous scientists in a particular
field... that pattern is not "getting into politics" but rather "moving well
beyond the scientific area where they made their name"

~~~
dalke
And I'm saying that that pattern doesn't exist, at least no more for
scientists than for any other field. (If you broaden your field to other than
politics, then think about all the other people who have switched careers.
President Obama was a law professor earlier in life. Sting was a
schoolteacher.)

I gave a list of famous scientists who did not move well beyond the scientific
area where they made their name. I'll add more: Cyrus Levinthal, Dorothy
Hodgkin, Hermann Weyl, Edsger Dijkstra, Maria Mitchell, Abraham Maslow, John
Wheeler. The list goes on and on. Again, consult a list of Nobel Prize winners
and see how it's no more common for "famous scientists in a particular field"
to do what you say they do than for any other profession.

I posit that you have sampling error, in that you've mostly only heard of
scientists who are known in their field and are also known for work outside
their field.

------
PaulHoule
Now, this is exactly what's so crazy about patents.

Something like email doesn't get 'invented' by one person, it's the kind of
thing that multiple people will arrive at through different paths at about the
same time.

------
ilamont
Slashdot discussion:

[http://tech.slashdot.org/story/12/06/12/167227/inventor-
of-e...](http://tech.slashdot.org/story/12/06/12/167227/inventor-of-email-
gets-support-of-noam-chomsky)

------
6ren
We complain that there's nothing new, and here someone's electronic messaging
system is being claimed to have been new _because_ it was a reinvention. No
one can argue with its success.

Perhaps there's a lesson here, that the best innovations are adapting systems
that already work to new contexts. Invention from scratch is hard to get right
(and hard to adopt).

