8 ms·

Who Invented Email? Just Ask…Noam Chomsky

36 points by wpinbacker 14y ago

ilamont 14y ago
Slashdot discussion: http://tech.slashdot.org/story/12/06/12/167227/inventor-of-email-gets-support-of-noam-chomsky http://tech.slashdot.org/story/12/06/12/167227/inventor-of-e...
PaulHoule 14y ago
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.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
yummyfajitas 14y ago
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_questions_about/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/2as/diseased_thinking_dissolving_que...
- sashahart 14y ago
  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 http://www.chomsky.info/articles.htm (this is a similar pattern to many old scientists)
  - spinebless 14y ago
    lolwhat? you're not fit to tie his shoe laces. but then again, weak ad-hominems are a pattern to those who aren't, and/or are admiring the clothes of naked emperors, right? "old scientist" -- chomsky got dragged into this by paying attention ever since the vietnam war, when not many people did. you irresponsible, ungrateful little fuck! (mod that down, ban me -- it's worth saying something that actually matters)
    - sashahart 14y ago
      I don't have to be grateful to Chomsky for expressing his opinion, that's his right. I don't know what the Vietnam war has to do with the invention of email. edit: nor did I ever say anything to run interference for the Vietnam War. Or Pol Pot, or Hugo Chavez...
  - why-el 14y ago
    I don't know what you mean by old, but Chomsky has been an activist for over 40 years now.
    - sashahart 14y ago
      Chomsky is old in the same sense that Dawkins is old and many others are old, namely that they are retired famous scientists who made their name a long time ago and now mostly focus on other topics.
      - deleted 14y ago
        [deleted]
  - yummyfajitas 14y ago
    I'm aware of Chomsky's political proclivities, but this is purely a debate over the definition of "email". The nature of the actual systems invented is not in dispute, merely what to call them.
    - sashahart 14y ago
      You said he was a linguist. I said that he hasn't done a lot in linguistics for many years now, which is true. I wasn't picking on Chomsky for being political. Even much of his work in linguistics was polemics - the famous review of Verbal Behavior is pure polemics. edit: and in interviews Chomsky has said that he felt a lot of this work had an essentially political purpose - talking about some nexus between Continental-style rationalism and opposition to totalitarianism, with which he associated the behaviorists
  - dalke 14y ago
    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 14y ago
      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 14y ago
        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.
- dkarl 14y ago
  Chomsky is interested in power, not semantics. The question "Who invented email?" has a variety of possible meanings, and if you clarify what you mean, the answer follows from the facts. But people don't care what the question means; they care about the prestige attached to the answer. This is more true of Chomsky than of the average person because of his obsession with power. He knows it is an attention-getting question, and he wants to answer it in favor of a powerless underdog who was robbed of his just deserts by well-connected "insiders," because he wants people to see that story everywhere. Therefore Chomsky runs with a particular interpretation of the question and disingenuously says, "The facts are indisputable," when he knows that the facts are the least issue in the dispute. Chomsky is as much a rhetorician and an entertainer as anyone on the right, though his intelligence and love of underdogs make him a lot more likable than someone like Rush Limbaugh.
  - yummyfajitas 14y ago
    This is a very interesting (and plausible) theory about Chomsky's motivations. But again - it's irrelevant to us. We know who invented which software package and what functionality each one had. The rest is a debate over variable names.
    - dkarl 14y ago
      It's irrelevant to answering the question as we understand it, but it's relevant when we end up talking to people who don't have our perspective. I think most people's first assumption is that email is a simple, unitary concept that must have had a single inventor.
  - calibraxis 14y ago
    Some of the comments here are very strange. Chomsky worked in MIT's electronics lab, because MIT didn't have a linguistics department before he came along, and the government was throwing all sorts of money around to build the high tech industry. I imagine it was rather chaotic and exciting. So Chomsky probably knows what he's talking about. This is about his work life, not his participation in political life.
  - 14y ago
6ren 14y ago
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).
DanielBMarkham 14y ago
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 14y ago
  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 14y ago
    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.

36 points by wpinbacker 14y ago

Slashdot discussion: http://tech.slashdot.org/story/12/06/12/167227/inventor-of-email-gets-support-of-noam-chomsky http://tech.slashdot.org/story/12/06/12/167227/inventor-of-e...

PaulHoule 14y ago

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.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]

yummyfajitas 14y ago

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_questions_about/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/2as/diseased_thinking_dissolving_que...

sashahart 14y ago
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 http://www.chomsky.info/articles.htm (this is a similar pattern to many old scientists)
- spinebless 14y ago
  lolwhat? you're not fit to tie his shoe laces. but then again, weak ad-hominems are a pattern to those who aren't, and/or are admiring the clothes of naked emperors, right? "old scientist" -- chomsky got dragged into this by paying attention ever since the vietnam war, when not many people did. you irresponsible, ungrateful little fuck! (mod that down, ban me -- it's worth saying something that actually matters)
  - sashahart 14y ago
    I don't have to be grateful to Chomsky for expressing his opinion, that's his right. I don't know what the Vietnam war has to do with the invention of email. edit: nor did I ever say anything to run interference for the Vietnam War. Or Pol Pot, or Hugo Chavez...
- why-el 14y ago
  I don't know what you mean by old, but Chomsky has been an activist for over 40 years now.
  - sashahart 14y ago
    Chomsky is old in the same sense that Dawkins is old and many others are old, namely that they are retired famous scientists who made their name a long time ago and now mostly focus on other topics.
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
- yummyfajitas 14y ago
  I'm aware of Chomsky's political proclivities, but this is purely a debate over the definition of "email". The nature of the actual systems invented is not in dispute, merely what to call them.
  - sashahart 14y ago
    You said he was a linguist. I said that he hasn't done a lot in linguistics for many years now, which is true. I wasn't picking on Chomsky for being political. Even much of his work in linguistics was polemics - the famous review of Verbal Behavior is pure polemics. edit: and in interviews Chomsky has said that he felt a lot of this work had an essentially political purpose - talking about some nexus between Continental-style rationalism and opposition to totalitarianism, with which he associated the behaviorists
- dalke 14y ago
  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 14y ago
    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 14y ago
      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.
dkarl 14y ago
Chomsky is interested in power, not semantics. The question "Who invented email?" has a variety of possible meanings, and if you clarify what you mean, the answer follows from the facts. But people don't care what the question means; they care about the prestige attached to the answer. This is more true of Chomsky than of the average person because of his obsession with power. He knows it is an attention-getting question, and he wants to answer it in favor of a powerless underdog who was robbed of his just deserts by well-connected "insiders," because he wants people to see that story everywhere. Therefore Chomsky runs with a particular interpretation of the question and disingenuously says, "The facts are indisputable," when he knows that the facts are the least issue in the dispute. Chomsky is as much a rhetorician and an entertainer as anyone on the right, though his intelligence and love of underdogs make him a lot more likable than someone like Rush Limbaugh.
- yummyfajitas 14y ago
  This is a very interesting (and plausible) theory about Chomsky's motivations. But again - it's irrelevant to us. We know who invented which software package and what functionality each one had. The rest is a debate over variable names.
  - dkarl 14y ago
    It's irrelevant to answering the question as we understand it, but it's relevant when we end up talking to people who don't have our perspective. I think most people's first assumption is that email is a simple, unitary concept that must have had a single inventor.
- calibraxis 14y ago
  Some of the comments here are very strange. Chomsky worked in MIT's electronics lab, because MIT didn't have a linguistics department before he came along, and the government was throwing all sorts of money around to build the high tech industry. I imagine it was rather chaotic and exciting. So Chomsky probably knows what he's talking about. This is about his work life, not his participation in political life.
- 14y ago

6ren 14y ago

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).

DanielBMarkham 14y ago

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 14y ago
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 14y ago
  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.