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The funny thing is, I was a subscriber to Agre's mailing list (the archive of which is still at https://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/agre/rre.html https://pages
by r_klancer 5y ago
The funny thing is, I was a subscriber to Agre's mailing list (the archive of which is still at https://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/agre/rre.html https://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/agre/rre.html)
I was impressed by his methodical way of dissecting the design of information systems and how they interacted with the social context. The didactic brilliance was consistent with his (and David Chapman's) famous AAAI paper about the "Pengi" system https://aaai.org/Library/AAAI/1987/aaai87-048.php https://aaai.org/Library/AAAI/1987/aaai87-048.php -- although I didn't realize at first that he was the Agre in "Agre and Chapman".
Yet, somehow, I missed the importance of whatever he said about privacy. Like others I was more interested in what new things we could build if we were all as sharp as him.
(The "Surveillance and Capture" paper mentioned by the Post seems to capture an important distinction between two modes of privacy invasion; even 20 years later I see attempts to discuss privacy concerns founder on a failure to reckon with this distinction. I will now read.)
- kragen 5y agoI second your implicit recommendation to read the RRE archives, which mysteriously the Washington Post article didn't include a link to. I was an RRE reader for many years, and occasionally he quoted my replies. Well, once.
- fencepost 5y agoOne of the things I still remember picking up from RRE was to remember that you can index from either end. Imagine that you have a knob with 10 positions and need to adjust it by feel to the 8th. Don't start at 1 and count up 7, go all the way to the end and count back down 3 instead. It was an unusual and always interesting read.
- fencepost 5y agoFencepost error, count back 2 if starting from 10
- schoen 5y agoDavid Chapman is still very interesting (now a Buddhist philosopher). Here are some of his references to his collaboration with Phil Agre https://metarationality.com/ken-wilber-boomeritis-artificial-intelligence https://metarationality.com/ken-wilber-boomeritis-artificial... https://metarationality.com/abstract-emergent https://metarationality.com/abstract-emergent I was also a subscriber to RRE. I sometimes wrote to Agre in reply, usually with pretty naive commentary; he would usually then tell me that my commentary was pretty naive. Agre's disappearance/reclusion reminds me of Grothendieck's.