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Knuth versus Email (1999)
- 082349872349872 6y agoFor people not DEK tempted to try this approach, consider the implications of http://phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1446 http://phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1446 . On the other hand, I do have a friend who, while he was Dean, had his email on three day delay. The theory: only those problems which were still problems after 72 hours were worth addressing at a super-departmental level.
- impendia 6y ago> while he was Dean, had his email on three day delay. I'm a professor. I can't help but think that this is a terrible idea. As Dean, it is your job to enable the faculty members and department chairs who report to you. To figure out what obstacles they face, and remove them when possible. To figure out who is doing good work -- especially of the sort that goes unnoticed. To sort through requests for money and other resources, and to figure out who will put these resources to good use. In other words, the same as any manager at any organization.
- bregma 6y agoIf it's important enough to not tolerate a 72-hour delay, email is a completely inappropriate medium through which it should be communicated. A competent worker would certainly be aware of that. The medium is part of the message. Avoid sending the wrong message.
- ggrrhh_ta 6y agoWhat would the proper way be?
- mschuster91 6y agoIf it's urgent, drop a call.
- ghaff 6y agoOf course, plenty of people here would toss a fit if someone were to call their phone. It's also worth noting that your perceived crisis may not be my crisis.
- bregma 6y agoThere is a clear heirarchy of media ordered by immediacy. - face-to-face - phone call - text messaging (through whatever: SMS, IRC, message flavour of the month...) - email - longhand on stationery Note that immediacy and importance are orthogonal.
- cujo 6y agoIf you don't want to use email, fine. But this is work, not your personal jollies. I'm sure this guy would have pitched a fit if the people below him decided not to see him in person until they ran 3 laps around the building, or whatever ridiculous requirement they dreamt up.
- rimliu 6y agoThere is no contradiction there. You still will be solving problems and enabling, just with some low-pass filter in front. Which is (mostly) good. Less noice, higher the quality.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- bawana 6y agoOk. Well, I guess ‘social media’ is a nonstarter for him. OTOH, maybe his insight says something about our addiction to social media. He has a real life and the rest of us have less of it. Who knew that computer scientists could craft a tool that Could steal our lives.
- spiderfarmer 6y ago"I have reached an age where my main purpose is not to receive messages.'" This is my goal. Avoiding unnecessary stress and interruptions is a bigger goal for me than creating more wealth. It's not an age thing though. I'm 37. I still happily communicate with other people, but ideally it's only when I make or take the time for it. That's why I worked from home, in a rural area, trying to get to 100% 'passive' income by the end of 2021.
- pharmhax 6y agoWhat type of passive income are you aiming for?
- spiderfarmer 6y agoI don't want to put all my eggs in one basket, so I am growing income streams from subscriptions, ads and affiliate partnerships. I target niches without a lot of competition. The amount of customer support is negligible, customers are happy and everything is automated, apart from invoicing.
- enriquto 6y agoHaving a "passive income" is the neat way of saying social parasitism.
- andi999 6y agoMaybe there are better non-dehumanizing terms? Honestly, this term is basically the gist of nazi terminology 33-45, creating a mental analogy of a human group to animal pests.
- gunnihinn 6y agoCalm down, Bret Stephens.
- eternalban 6y agoThat is only true if you are not in banking. In banking, earning interest is an 'ancient virtue'.
- supernova87a 6y agoWell, he only gets to do this because he's achieved some measure of success in his life, right? I dare others not so distinguished to try and reproduce his approach.
- gridlockd 6y agoI generally don't reply to unsolicited email, giving up on billions of dollars in inheritance money from my Nigerian relatives. If I can do it, so can you.
- aberseti 6y agoI would take a middle of the road approach and say that you should be incredibly sparing with who you give your email and maybe have a custom spam filter so you only get a few really important emails per month.
- NateEag 6y agoI've had decent success establishing in my workplace that I check email in batches a few times a day. If you want me immediately, call me, message me, or walk over to me (well, pre-COVID, anyway). I'm confident I'm not as distinguished or successful as Donald Knuth.
- timwis 6y agoThis freedom seems directly tied to where you are on the totem pole..
- andreskytt 6y agoThe man has spent a lifetime getting there. You could, too.
- fileeditview 6y agoThis approach certainly gets rid of a lot of unnecessary communication. It is like a special spam filter. Not many people will go through with writing a real letter. For most requests it's probably not worth it for them. Et voila... filtered. If you don't need anyone reaching you this seems like a good strategy.
- dmortin 6y agoIt's easy not to have email if you have a secretary who filters and prints out the incoming messages for you. I guess he never orders anything on the net, doesn't use any online services, because those usually require an email address where the receipts and acknowledgements are sent.
- rwmj 6y agoI imagine one day we'll all have digital personal assistants who can do this, so having a secretary shouldn't be a barrier eventually. My worry is that these personal assistants will all be provided "free" by giant companies and hosted in the cloud so I won't want to use them.
- segfaultbuserr 6y ago> personal assistants will all be provided "free" by giant companies and hosted in the cloud so I won't want to use them. The more worrying fact to me, is not MegaCorp will be providing it, but that it's possible that self-hosting would be technologically infeasible. That is, even if MegaCorp gives you a free and open copy of personal assistant, it's still not practical run it on your own hardware - massive computing power and storage is required to operate it, and massive data is needed to train (and continue to train) the machine learning model. Only MegaCorp can afford to run it, and provide it as a service. This has already happened in web search, content recommendation, speech recognition, machine translation, and many more applications. It's simply impossible to run your own speech recognition or machine translation package that has a comparable quality to Google's. And these technologies will eventually become an integral part of life in a future society - e.g. When you must use machine translation or personal assistant in your daily life, and when only MegaCorp can provide a high-quality solution, it's a recipe of disaster. It's Ghost in the Shell. Unfortunately, I'm definitely seeing it as a very likely outcome. The only possible way to stop it, is to continue advancing computing power according to Moore's Law - which is, fortunately, not entirely impossible if alternative computing technologies are developed in the future. But still, there's still the ML training problem.
- 6y ago
- abdullahkhalids 6y agoThe amount of connectedness is a spectrum. DK [1] is at one extreme end of the spectrum, the other end is getting a notification at any time of the day or night when you get an email and immediately reading it. We all have different jobs, and all jobs require different amounts of connectedness. But if you want, you can move slowly towards DK's end of the spectrum. I don't have email on my phone, for instance. While inconvenient sometimes, the benefits outweigh the costs. And when I want to do deep work, I close Thunderbird. [1] Such appropriate initials.
- jonny383 6y agoWhat a waste of trees.
- mtreis86 6y agoI don't understand this, can't we just grow more trees? Reading emails is a huge waste of time and I don't see how we can produce much more of that, let alone produce more Donald Knuths.
- throw0101a 6y ago> I don't understand this, can't we just grow more trees? Sure. But you also have to transport people to the forests where they grow, operate machines to cut them down and trim them, transport them to pulp mills, use a lot of water to generate the pulp (often add bleach to whiten it), and then distribute the final product. There's also the create of printers and ink/toner. And once DK has spent 30-60s reading the printout, it gets tossed into (hopefully) the blue pin where more energy is spent trying to recycle it. And a lot of the energy used is generated from fossil fuels.
- notmyname9173 6y agoAnd the paper that's sent to landfills breaks down into global warming-worsening gases.
- tinus_hn 6y agoLet’s ban wrapping paper
- theaeolist 6y agoIt's not true, obviously. I have been in DK's office, I have seen him read and write email.
- cpach 6y agoO_o
- raister 6y agoWhich client does he use?
- treeman79 6y ago2 bar magnets. He reads emails one iota at a time
- raister 6y ago> My boss did his PhD at Stanford. The story goes that one day he walked straight into Knuth's office, while he had the door open. Knuth says "Oh dear, I seem to have made a mistake. Could you close the door please?". Boss closes the door. Knuth says "No, from the other side". Source: reddit
- krypton2k 6y agoI think this was from an episode of The IT Crowd.
- Fiveplus 6y agoHaving refuted the central point of this entire essay, why do you think he wrote this in the first place?
- richrichardsson 6y agoAs a PR piece for why most email to him goes unanswered?
- 6y ago
- m0ck 6y agoI always found it hilarious that this guy was fed up with email 5 fucking years before the first machine was connected to Internet in my Central European country.
- container 6y agoThat sounds a little surprising to me. Are you sure that weren't even any government or university machines online before early 1995?
- deepstack 6y agoThose were the good day of Email. Pine or Elm all the way on Unix account on uni work stations only.
- keiferski 6y ago"The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed." - William Gibson Your comment adds a funny twist to this well-known quote. Usually it's said in the context of "someone has cool high-tech stuff that other people don't have." But the reverse is true, too; the Sentinel Islanders [1] have so far avoided the "future" of managing your inbox. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Sentinel_Island https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Sentinel_Island
- gerikson 6y agoMy favorite Knuth quote is from his FAQ on being retired[1] > Being a retired professor is a lot like being an ordinary professor, except that you don't have to write research proposals, administer grants, or sit in committee meetings. Also, you don't get paid. [1] https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/retd.html https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/retd.html
- kashyapc 6y agoFor many open source contributors and maintainers, it's always not an option to "be on the bottom of things". Patches (for some projects) flow via e-mail. So there's some decent amount of "being on top of things". Not at the rate of "I need to feverishly refresh my Inbox every 2 minutes", but "I ought process these patches/designs/bug e-mails at some sane rate that doesn't drive me bonkers". (Which can be done effectively with venerable tools like Mutt, et al; refer to the recent thread on it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24173676 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24173676 – "Mutt email client 25 years old") This is just saying the boring truth that there's different kind of e-mail—the draining, unproductive long threads that don't go anywhere and the "get the work done"-style patches/designs/bug work e-mails.
- bonzini 6y agoOh how I wish I sometimes had the choice to be on the bottom of things. :-) Though I sometimes do get pretty close to disconnecting myself if I have some difficult or urgent task, and on vacation of course. If the world around us cannot survive with us leaving for a week or two, there's a problem on both sides!
- kashyapc 6y agoI hear you. :-) I never cease to be amazed at how seasoned maintainers like you handle the sheer volume of public email, while continuing to stay effective over the years, healthy disconnection, and setting an example to emulate on how to conduct oneself in public. (On the problem you refer to, some of us here will recognise that well-meaning FOSS developer who starts getting anxious to take a two-week vacation with the family because "there's no one else who is able to process the core pull requests" for their project.)
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- letusknow123 6y agoI enjoyed this one.
- mlang23 6y agoInteresting. I remember having written an email to Donald Knuth about 15 years ago. And, surprise surprise, I got a reply! In retrospect, my question was extremely naive. However, I am still thankful for a honest answer.
- tosh 6y ago> Of course, "email" has been a familiar word in France, Germany, and the Netherlands much longer than in England --- but for an entirely different reason. https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Émail_(verre) https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Émail_(verre) https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_(glazuur) https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_(glazuur)
- pulse7 6y agoIn UK: "How to send an 'E mail'" (1984): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szdbKz5CyhA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szdbKz5CyhA
- nanna 6y agoThames TV transmitted programmes over TV audio?! What a wonderful watch, thank you pulse7. Electronically yours,
- Yetanfou 6y agoThere used to be a thing called 'Basicode' [1], one of the first attempts to create a cross-platform language for microcomputers. Basicode consisted of the programming language itself which was a rather limited dialect of BASIC, a number of transcoders from this basicode BASIC dialect to the native BASIC versions for several microcomputers and - which is what made me think of it - a universal audio data transmission standard which was used to transmit Basicode programs over the aether to users. Basicode was started in the Netherlands by the 'Hobbyscooop' radio show but gained popularity elsewhere as well, notably also in the former German Democratic Republic. I still have the original Basicode book somewhere in a box in the barn, along with the Commodore 64 which I used it with. To be honest I quickly got bored with Basicode since the programs received through the radio were rather underwhelming compared to what I could make the thing do myself by programming it in assembly (6502 might be limited but it is a good starting architecture for budding assembly programmers). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASICODE https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASICODE
- 6y ago
- amelius 6y agoThere would be less spam if sending it had an actual cost. Perhaps we should just add a (small) price to sending email?
- simonebrunozzi 6y agoBill Gates had a proposal like that, back in the mid 90s if I recall correctly.
- dragonwriter 6y ago> Perhaps we should just add a (small) price to sending email? Might work better if the fee is returned unless the recipient explicitly rejects payment within some set time window (which might be automated by or for the recipient, e.g., as part of a spam filter.)
- vbezhenar 6y agoThere were attempts to introduce computing costs required to deliver a message. Hashcash is a proof-of-work system used to limit email spam. Bitmessage uses proof of work to combat spam as well. Though those approaches do not seem to be popular. My guess is that spammers can operate at scale, rent or buy GPUs, may be even build ASICs. So they'll have very cheap work. While ordinary person will use some cheap 5-year old Android phone which would spend a lot of time and battery to compute that kind of work. It might reduce amount of extremely low-quality spam. But I guess that kind of spam is easily detectable by something like default spamassassin setup anyway.
- amelius 6y agoI'm not a fan of solutions that require energy to be wasted. At least with normal payments, total value is conserved.
- guenthert 6y agoThis isn't unlike SMTP tarpitting. No monies are exchanged, but a cost incurred.
- jhncls 6y agoLex Fridman had an interesting interview with Don Knuth close to his 82nd birthday[0]. It's fascinating to learn how much energy he still spends at verifying and investigating each aspect of newly published algorithms. E-mail would probably cut away too much time from what he considers more important. [0]: https://youtu.be/2BdBfsXbST8 https://youtu.be/2BdBfsXbST8
- MrXOR 6y agoUPDATE1: Don has an email address: taocp (at) cs.stanford.edu UPDATE2: How the World’s Most Famous Computer Scientist Checks E-mail Only Once Every Three Months: https://www.calnewport.com/blog/2008/07/17/bonus-post-how-the-worlds-most-famous-computer-scientist-checks-e-mail-only-once-every-three-months/ https://www.calnewport.com/blog/2008/07/17/bonus-post-how-th... I find past discussion of this link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11461077 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11461077 Neal Stephenson vs Email or Why I Am a Sociomediapath? https://www.nealstephenson.com/social-media.html https://www.nealstephenson.com/social-media.html https://www.nealstephenson.com/contact.html https://www.nealstephenson.com/contact.html Good Links to read more: https://www.chronicle.com/article/is-email-making-professors-stupid/ https://www.chronicle.com/article/is-email-making-professors... https://www.calnewport.com/blog/2008/07/02/e-mail-zero-imagining-life-without-e-mail/ https://www.calnewport.com/blog/2008/07/02/e-mail-zero-imagi... https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/was-e-mail-a-mistake https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/was-e-ma...
- dhosek 6y agoI had a few exchanges with DEK back in the 80s. Even then he had his secretary filtering his e-mail and if a response was warranted, she would request a postal address so he could send his answer handwritten on a printout of the e-mail. I still have those answers in a box along with other correspondence from the era.
- drfuchs 6y agoThe intensely loyal Phyllis Winkler. You couldn’t even get into DEK’s office without going through hers, which I think was a unique arrangement in Margaret Jacks Hall.
- jfk13 6y agoI also had a few such exchanges (mine would have been at the end of the 80s or early 90s, I think) -- by snail-mail in both directions. His replies came in envelopes addressed to me as "Dr. ..." or even once as "Prof. ...", which I found pleasantly amusing, as I hadn't actually graduated from anywhere, let alone reached such exalted heights. (His usual form of reply, as I recall it, would be a note pencilled on a copy of my letter.)
- dhosek 6y agoI often got email addressed to Prof. Hosek or Dr. Hosek when I was in undergrad courtesy of my activity in the TeX world. I don't think I've gotten any such misattribution once after actually getting a degree, even when I was teaching college as an adjunct.
- brettermeier 6y agoAn old-schooler printing out his emails... Why is this upvoted?
- the_af 6y agoI wonder what Knuth thinks of Slack and instant messaging then! Emails feels pretty low pressure to me. I don't need to answer it today -- or, in some cases, ever -- whereas Slack and similar messaging systems come with the expectation that you must answer ASAP. Surely you've seen the message, why aren't you typing an answer yet? It's very high pressure. I love email. Every attempt at replacing it with something "better" upsets me.
- rietta 6y agoI honestly thought of doing a blog post where I take these words and replace email with Slack. I have issues with email that my PM is trying hard to get me to delegate more to her and others so I can focus on the higher value work. Slack I actually am on the verge of hating. Especially when every client wants to communicate via their private Slack instead of much saner email and GitHub issues. The worst thing about Slack is the non-federated nature of it. It is practically impossible when you work with more than a dozen startups and other organizations all who have their own.
- divbzero 6y agoI’m picturing you printing out Slack messages, jotting down your responses, and sending them back by snail mail.
- simonebrunozzi 6y ago> `I don't even have an e-mail address. I have reached an age where my main purpose is not to receive messages.' --- Umberto Eco, quoted in the New Yorker Loved this quote from Umberto Eco. RIP. (died in 2016)
- brian_herman__ 6y agoHuman curated email that sounds like the perfect startup.
- slightwinder 6y agoI wonder whether he owns a smartphone now and if is is using it for personal communication with his family.
- ghaff 6y agoNot everyone in tech has a smartphone. I know a fairly senior manager at a well-known Silicon Valley company who only got one when he joined that company and they gave him one he needed to use for work.
- jahbrewski 6y agoMakes me question my own habits: compulsive checking of email/Slack has really become the norm. On the one hand, as a manager, I want to be available to my team if they have any questions. On the other hand, a barrage of notifications and interruptions makes it hard to get focused deep work done.
- 5cott0 6y agoWhat's an email?