Who Invented Email? Just Ask…Noam Chomsky | Hacker News Reader

Who Invented Email? Just Ask…Noam Chomsky

wired.com

36 pointswpinbacker29 comments

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.

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.

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.

> 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?

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. :)

Confusing.

"Pandering"? What possible definition of "pandering" are you using? This is an article about the origins of a technical communications medium, origins which apparently have some relation to semantics, commented on by the most eminent linguist I know of.

And since you're being all meta here and everything, and since you took the time to influence what's on the front page in this case, it's curious you apparently had no problem with yesterday's front page post which contained pertinent hacker news like...wait for it....the letter from divorced Ronald Reagan advising his son on marriage - a post you commented in and happened to take the time to include an Amazon affiliate link in.

...origins which apparently have some relation to semantics...

No, the origins have nothing to do with semantics. The debate over who invented "email" is dependent on the definition of the word "email". If you define email in certain ways, Van Vleck's 1961 system was the first email system. By Chomsky's definition, Van Vleck's 1961 invention doesn't qualify as email, but Ayyaduri's does.

What are you talking about? If all of a sudden there was a campaign to defame Vint Cerf through namecalling and slander, would that be "fluff" and "chitchat" for HN?

Chomsky is an qualified participant in this debate, unlike the examples you gave. He has published works on media analysis and the mechanisms by which facts are overpowered by propaganda. That is exactly the issue at stake here. Standing up for truth and rigorous investigation in the face of media pressure. That's why he is involved in this.. It's the kind of thing he's fought for his whole life.

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...

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)

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)

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...

I don't know what you mean by old, but Chomsky has been an activist for over 40 years now.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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"

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Chomsky isn't going to get a lot of power from anything at this point, he hit his stride politically some time ago. If you have read Chomsky's work from early academic stuff up through today, one unifying characteristic is that he is very good at polemics and very apt to it. That style is so much a part of him that it is completely unsurprising that he would use it even on something apparently strange like the invention of email. It's just a long term character trait.

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.

Slashdot discussion:

http://tech.slashdot.org/story/12/06/12/167227/inventor-of-e...

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).

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