Email Lessons from Napoleon | Hacker News Reader

Email Lessons from Napoleon

thesweetsetup.com

44 pointshecubus20 comments

His stance towards email reminds me of the book “Deep Work” that many HN threads talk about. I liked the idea of triaging your emails into 3 categories

Emails that will have a positive outcome regardless of when they are processed.

Emails that will have a negative outcome regardless of when they are processed.

Emails for which a timely response will make a difference.

Very frequently you are not a person that people won't mind you don't respond to them.

I need to read every non-spam email I receive and give a response if only to keep people in my network.

Your first sentence is quite tricky to parse due to the triple negative. I parsed it as:

Most people that email you will care if you ignore them.

Is that a... triple negative?

I think you mean senders expect a response?

Do you triage your spam?

What is the false positive ratio, do you think?

My false positive ratio for "spam" marked automatically by gmail is around 50%. It's only that low because I started receiving occasional spam emails; it was more like 90%.

(To be clear, I've interpreted your question as "of emails that got sent to the spam folder, how many of them had no business being in there?")

Let’s play a game, here’s how I would rephrase your first sentence:

You are often not the kind of person who can afford ignoring emails.

Clever, though it's worth noting that ping times circa 1812 tended to be measured in weeks or months. Mail was likely already three weeks old when delivered, urgency generally low.

That said, reading two-week-old (or older!) news often has a similar effect --- much of the urgency or uncertainty has been resolved.

>> that ping times circa 1812 tended to be measured in weeks or months.

Nope. At least, not in France. Their ping times were measured in minutes and hours.

https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-22909590

"Napoleonic semaphore was the world's first telegraph network, carrying messages across 19h-Century France faster than ever before.[...] At its most extensive, it comprised 534 stations covering more than 5,000km (3,106 miles). Messages sent from Paris could reach the outer fringes of the country in a matter of three or four hours. Before, it had taken despatch riders on horseback a similar number of days."

"Credit for the first successful optical telegraph goes to the French engineer Claude Chappe and his brothers in 1792, who succeeded in covering France with a network of 556 stations stretching a total distance of 4,800 kilometres (3,000 mi). Le système Chappe was used for military and national communications until the 1850s."

"A symbol sent from Paris took 2 minutes to reach Lille through 22 stations and 9 minutes to reach Lyon through 50 stations."

The original clacks! Terry Pratchett always finds ways to jump up when interesting factoids surface.

Thanks for this tech history lesson, it might explain something about 19th century France that I didn't learn in (French) school.

Yes, the Chappe optical telegraph existed, but it had limitations:

- Use was all but entirely limited to France. On campaign, mesages would revert to horseback.

- It was stopped by inclement weather.

- Net throughput was low, though I don't have a source on message traffic.

- Messages would have been brief ... one might say telegraphic. Little detail could be conveyed.

- Access was limited to government business. At least some of Napoleon's correspondents were likely denied access.

As counsel to others, Napoleon's mail-handling protocol would be subject to the long transits I describe.

>> On campaign, mesages would revert to horseback.

Well, for the army. Naval semaphore (flags) could pass information across serious distance. Scout ships would often be over the horizon from flagships, their messages relayed back in minutes. The speed of pre-electric mechanical communication is underappreciated today.

Also, carrier pigeons were faster than horses.

"Messenger pigeons were used as early as 1150 in Baghdad[8] and also later by Genghis Khan. By 1167 a regular service between Baghdad and Syria had been established by Sultan Nur ad-Din.[9]"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homing_pigeon

Fair point on pigeons. Mentioned as an example in Jon Bentley's Programming Pearls, in active use between Mountain View and Santa Cruz as late as the 1970s. Reading the Wikipedia article, I'd not realised use dated back to pharonic Egypt!

Still useful only between (or at least to) given established points, and adding new nodes took time.

Consider that a critical advantage of the Germans over the French in Fall Rot, June, 1940, was radio-equipped tanks, enabling direct unit-to-unit comms and improvisation on the battlefield.

Still, it's sobering that the Royal Road represented the plateau in long-distance information transmission for very nearly 2500 years:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Road

I'll also highlight the key phrase tended to be in my original comment.

by the nineteenth century in the UK most mail across the country would be delivered the next day. (im not sure of the history, it could be that in 1812, things were kind of slow, but it quickly sped up!)

A decade or so later into the Victorian age, mail sent in the same city was to be delivered within a couple of hours. In London there there twelve deliveries a day and in smaller cities up to about 6 times a day. People were able to reply and get responses in one day.

> The term “triage” is frequently thrown around when dealing with email, but did you know it actually originated as a medical term during the Napoleonic wars?

The author is making it sound like it’s an outdated term. It’s still in wide use today for medical emergencies, and I’d wager more people are familiar with the word in that context than as a way to sort email.

The charitable reading of that statement is that the fact that it's a medical term is presumed-known, while the fact that the term originated during the Napoleonic wars is presumed-novel.

But then that seems a bit strange doesn't it? Triage just means "sorting" in French, to this day as far as I know it doesn't have the specific meaning it has in English (or if it does, it's more to do with trains that sick people).

Does it mean that it was borrowed into English during the Napoleonic wars? I'd think that those perfidious Englishfolks would have been loathe to borrow French terms specifically during that period...

source: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5649292/

Etymology of “triàge”

Many documents have reported that the medical term “triàge,” as used in Japan, derives from the sorting of coffee beans.4, 5 However, Holler and others reported that “triàge” originated with the concept of thinning out inferior wool products in Britain in 1727. It has been reported that the term “triàge” was used for the sorting of coffee beans in Britain in around 1830.6 It would appear, however, that the medical use of the term “triàge” in the battlefield derives not from the classification of coffee beans but from the earlier sorting in the wool industry.

The etymology of “triàge” is French. Studies have shown that trier, which is the verb form of triàge, dates back to the 12th‐century Gallo‐Romance term triàre. That word can be divided into trià and eur, which mean, respectively, “three” and “crushing.” The French word triàge means “to thin out” in Japanese and “to categorize” in English. “Thinning out” signifies the removal of damaged items toward improving the overall quality. The original meaning of “triàge” is closer to the notion of thinning out than to categorization. However, the concept of sorting could also apply to such French terms as presélection, sélection, and choix.

“Triàge” may have come to be applied in the area of disaster medicine because it combines the meaning of both dividing into three and thinning out. With respect to military medical care, Larrey categorized triàge into three phases7. In a comparable fashion, French military doctors in World War I and Japanese military physicians in World War II divided sick or wounded soldiers into three categories according to the severity of their illnesses or wounds. Similarly, the Sort, Assess, Life‐Saving Interventions, Treatment and/or Transport (SALT) triàge, which is a modern American triàge method for dealing with disasters and mass casualties, involves an initial classification of cases into three categories.8

How weird that they put an accent on it. It doesn't have an accent in either French or English.

Working in a very big corporate I discovered the "it'll sort itself out" thing independently. If I didn't know for certain how to respond and resolve instantly I'd just leave it - and 99% of the time it would be fixed without me in 24hrs.

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