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THREAD BENDING ALERT: Was "Is Bezos a Bozo?" IS NOW"Reading Email exchanges chronologically"

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Steve Smith

Re: THREAD BENDING ALERT: Was "Is Bezos a Bozo?" IS NOW"Reading Email exchanges chronologically"

For the TL;DR crowd, a summary of my last response might be as simple as

"I am wanting" == Idle Speculation

"I want" == Statement of Intent

On 10/28/16 4:45 PM, glen ☣ wrote:

On 10/28/2016 03:10 PM, Steven A Smith wrote:

I've always assumed everyone else's does too... So, when one looks at the content of a mailing list like this, they can _see_ trees of threads, right? If not, I highly recommend a modern client. 8^) It helps a lot.

I agree... but I think many/most don't see this view and I don't believe many will obtain one soon nor easily.

It's just Mozilla Thunderbird (well, Icedove on one machine, Thunderbird on another)... It's free and open source, which means anyone can have it if they want it. I also think I remember Eudora having a nice tree-based threaded view. Pretty much any usenet reader has it. So, I'm confused why others wouldn't use such tools.

Maybe you can tell me how "Nick is wanting" structures your thoughts different from "Nick wants"?

I think it is my perceived tentativeness of what I think Nick wants... meaning I'm not sure he knows what he wants or understands the implications of what he wants. I'm not sure about the grammatical or semantic roots of this (why I use "is wanting" over "wants") but it is interesting to me that you can call it out so clearly. Unfortunately I am probably conflating or convolving my own unsureness of what I *think* Nicks wants into what I believe to be his own lack of clarity...

For contrast, I think I would be MUCH less likely to use the same phrasing to describe my understanding of what I *think* YOU want... or Marcus... or many others here who have a crisper sense of confidence in what you are asking/suggesting. Our patron St. Stephen of Guerin, I am *much* more likely to use "he is wanting".... perhaps Renee's "I am wanting" vs "I want" reflects some of this same ambiguity of detail? If she were more precise in her own mind about what she wants, might she be more likely to use the more assertive?

That's intriguing, as is Marcus'. I have noticed (and have the guts to point out for some reason) that lots of people express their thoughts with an external locus of control. My favorite example was when I noticed the CO^2 regulator on our office keg was broken. I asked my partner: What happened to the CO^2? He said "It broke." >8^) I asked for more clarity and he responded something like: "I was <doingsomethingorother> and it fell over and broke." So, I asserted: "Do you mean that you broke it?" And he relented and said "Yes."

Perhaps there is something of that in both your and Marcus' response. It's a kind of removal/abstraction/distancing from any intimate knowledge or clarity surrounding the itch ... left wanting some scratching.

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FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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Nick Thompson

Re: THREAD BENDING ALERT: Was "Is Bezos a Bozo?" IS NOW"Reading Email exchanges chronologically"

In reply to this post by gepr

Glen,

With a thread of any complexity it all, it becomes very tedious and tricky. However, you are right that just a few conventions observed by email writers could make it a lot easier. Let's say you began every one of your messages with"<date, time> BEGIN GLEN" (just above the header) and ended it with END GLEN. A simple word macro could strip out all the quotations and we would be left with the bare messages. Larding would be forbidden. Now, I think a sort could reorder the messages in order of occurrence.

Note the premise, tho. We would have to get correspondents to start their message with those little bits of text. I don't think even I would do it.

Nick

Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
Clark University
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

-----Original Message-----
From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of ?glen?
Sent: Friday, October 28, 2016 12:35 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] THREAD BENDING ALERT: Was "Is Bezos a Bozo?" IS NOW"Reading Email exchanges chronologically"

Let's think about what you're asking for a minute. There are very few on the list who care to spend the energy to participate at all. such lurkers undoubtedly have valuable opinions. But there's some hurdle of effort (or unwillingness) that prevents them from expressing those opinions. Of the people who _do_ participate, very few of them can find the energy to delete all the extra characters, even those added automatically by the mailing list software (at the bottom of each post). I can't even explain how easy it is to delete that before responding. That nobody does it is absolutely flabbergasting, to me. But there it is.

So, when you ask whether it's really that hard, it spawns the questions: Is it really that hard to trim/edit one's replies? ... to use the threading feature of one's email client? ... to ignore threads or particular posters? ... to standardize things across email clients (e.g. the quotation prefix and "quote" line, plain text vs. html, character encodings)?

The answers to all these questions is "No" it's not hard at all. These are all problems that have been solved multiple times in other contexts. But it is work (as distinct from play). And work usually requires incentive. What's the incentive?

On 10/27/2016 10:29 AM, Nick Thompson wrote:
> Is the problem THIS hard? It would seem to me that the first step would be to simply reorder the email messages eliminating any previous email messages automatically included in each subsequent message. Once the messages were in the right order and the inclusions of previous messages were eliminated, I could write macro’s to get rid of the headers. By inclusions I don’t mean places where somebody intentionally pulled out a passage from somebody’s message to comment on. (I believe you call that quotation.) I mean the routine inclusion of prior messages as a part of the reply process.

--
␦glen?

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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

Owen Densmore

Re: THREAD BENDING ALERT: Was "Is Bezos a Bozo?" IS NOW"Reading Email exchanges chronologically"

Administrator

In reply to this post by Steve Smith

Sorry to be pedestrian, but how about the OP's desire to convert thread(s) into posts/correspondence?

I take Nick seriously here, it has been his goal from the beginning, right?

-- Owen

On Fri, Oct 28, 2016 at 5:56 PM, Steven A Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

Glen -

I am a Mozilla/Tbird Man myself but am used to many people clinging to very oldschool text-only (or worse?) mail tools. I also don't have any trouble sorting the complexity of comment/response/inlining/inclusion in my head for the most part, but that is how my head works... I think that is excruciating unto impossible for some.

I do acknowledge/agree-to your description of the experience of "to want" vs "to be wanting"... I personally mostly *want* what I want but I also know the feeling of *to be wanting*. It isn't a simple question of expression... it is a deeper experience of association/dissociation and intention IMO.

Your example of the co-worker distancing himself from the responsibilty/agency of "breaking" something is a red herring in this case (I think)... it may be related, but not directly?

I agree that there is a distancing/abstraction from the itch as you put it, but at least in my own case, expressing it as "I am wanting" rather than "I want" is intentional and an attempt to be more responsible or precise about what I mean.

I suppose, a difference between "I want" and "I am wanting" involves actionability. If I tell you "I want" something, you should be put on notice that I am likely to take action to pursue acquiring/achieving the subject of that wanting. But if I say "I am wanting", you can take some solace (or not) in knowing that I have not internalized that "wanting" into any formulated action. In the language of the 10 commandments, it is the subtle distinction between finding your house or wife attractive/compelling/desireable and actually finding myself making plans to move in and shag her first chance I get. Yahweh didn't have PowerPoint and a numerically controlled stone chisel to put in these subtleties with sub-bullet points? Or were those tablets clay, suggesting a 3d deposition printer instead?

In the case at hand (Nick's want or wanting), I would say he is not asking anyone specifically to take action, to find or create the toolset he is seeking, he is just speculating out loud and probably *hoping* such things already exist or perhaps someone else actually *wants* the toolset enough to create it.

Have I split the dead horse hair enough yet? I am wanting to know (but don't feel compelled to tell me)!

<gurgle>

- Steve

On 10/28/16 4:45 PM, glen ☣ wrote:

On 10/28/2016 03:10 PM, Steven A Smith wrote:

I've always assumed everyone else's does too... So, when one looks at the content of a mailing list like this, they can _see_ trees of threads, right? If not, I highly recommend a modern client. 8^) It helps a lot.

I agree... but I think many/most don't see this view and I don't believe many will obtain one soon nor easily.

It's just Mozilla Thunderbird (well, Icedove on one machine, Thunderbird on another)... It's free and open source, which means anyone can have it if they want it. I also think I remember Eudora having a nice tree-based threaded view. Pretty much any usenet reader has it. So, I'm confused why others wouldn't use such tools.

Maybe you can tell me how "Nick is wanting" structures your thoughts different from "Nick wants"?

I think it is my perceived tentativeness of what I think Nick wants... meaning I'm not sure he knows what he wants or understands the implications of what he wants. I'm not sure about the grammatical or semantic roots of this (why I use "is wanting" over "wants") but it is interesting to me that you can call it out so clearly. Unfortunately I am probably conflating or convolving my own unsureness of what I *think* Nicks wants into what I believe to be his own lack of clarity...

For contrast, I think I would be MUCH less likely to use the same phrasing to describe my understanding of what I *think* YOU want... or Marcus... or many others here who have a crisper sense of confidence in what you are asking/suggesting. Our patron St. Stephen of Guerin, I am *much* more likely to use "he is wanting".... perhaps Renee's "I am wanting" vs "I want" reflects some of this same ambiguity of detail? If she were more precise in her own mind about what she wants, might she be more likely to use the more assertive?

That's intriguing, as is Marcus'. I have noticed (and have the guts to point out for some reason) that lots of people express their thoughts with an external locus of control. My favorite example was when I noticed the CO^2 regulator on our office keg was broken. I asked my partner: What happened to the CO^2? He said "It broke." >8^) I asked for more clarity and he responded something like: "I was <doingsomethingorother> and it fell over and broke." So, I asserted: "Do you mean that you broke it?" And he relented and said "Yes."

Perhaps there is something of that in both your and Marcus' response. It's a kind of removal/abstraction/distancing from any intimate knowledge or clarity surrounding the itch ... left wanting some scratching.

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

Nick Thompson

Re: THREAD BENDING ALERT: Was "Is Bezos a Bozo?" IS NOW"Reading Email exchanges chronologically"

Hi, Owen, and all,

You have me right. There’s a big difference between entertaining a question – noodling, if you will – and demanding an answer.

Confession time: I come from a world in which success is measured out in published writing. That’s not the only world, but it’s a world. During my 12 years with you folks I have seen a dozen great papers slip through our grasp and into oblivion on the FRIAM list for want of an easy way to transpose our correspondence into coherent text, text that could be read with pleasure by others. I once was an experienced developmental editor …. Several edited collections on various subjects. Every time I read one of these email exchanges I get itchy editorial fingers. In fact, I always get itchy editorial fingers when I see good ideas go to waste.

Owen, you are also correct that I have had this problem for years. When I was a professor I spent a lot of time working with the writing of students. I had a terrible time getting student to think of themselves as the sort of creatures who had ideas about the world which they needed to defend in writing. I had an even worse time trying to convince them that people who disagreed with them were their great allies in developing an argument. They saw papers as something you wrote to make professors happy, not as vehicles for changing the thoughts of others. But to my joy, when email distribution lists came around, I got them to argue in email because they didn’t think of email as Writing. In email, they found it easier to argue as if the arguments made a difference. But I never could get them to take the next step and edit their correspondence into collaborative writing. I had to settle for letting them present their email-arguments, reprinted in sequence, in lieu of final papers, which I did, reluctantly, for years.

Even since that time, I have wondered what if a software could be invented that would re-present an email discussion in its rhetorical order, so that email correspondence could readily be seen as a step to the development of published writing that convinces. Would such a software unleash a flood of collaboration? I dunno, but I would love to see.

By the way, I have found the discussion about the “grammar of wanting” very interesting. It is the kind of issue that normally would lead me to join you in the wallow, but I haven’t been feeling all that well, lately, and there has been lots of incoming, so I have had to watch from the shore. Let me just say that I think that each of those ways of wanting corresponds to a different higher order pattern of behavior, and that all of you are as privileged as I to decide which kind of wanting I have been engaging in.

Thanks for all your thoughts.

Nick

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Owen Densmore
Sent: Friday, October 28, 2016 8:28 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] THREAD BENDING ALERT: Was "Is Bezos a Bozo?" IS NOW"Reading Email exchanges chronologically"

Sorry to be pedestrian, but how about the OP's desire to convert thread(s) into posts/correspondence?

I take Nick seriously here, it has been his goal from the beginning, right?

-- Owen

On Fri, Oct 28, 2016 at 5:56 PM, Steven A Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

Glen -

I am a Mozilla/Tbird Man myself but am used to many people clinging to very oldschool text-only (or worse?) mail tools. I also don't have any trouble sorting the complexity of comment/response/inlining/inclusion in my head for the most part, but that is how my head works... I think that is excruciating unto impossible for some.

I do acknowledge/agree-to your description of the experience of "to want" vs "to be wanting"... I personally mostly *want* what I want but I also know the feeling of *to be wanting*. It isn't a simple question of expression... it is a deeper experience of association/dissociation and intention IMO.

Your example of the co-worker distancing himself from the responsibilty/agency of "breaking" something is a red herring in this case (I think)... it may be related, but not directly?

I agree that there is a distancing/abstraction from the itch as you put it, but at least in my own case, expressing it as "I am wanting" rather than "I want" is intentional and an attempt to be more responsible or precise about what I mean.

I suppose, a difference between "I want" and "I am wanting" involves actionability. If I tell you "I want" something, you should be put on notice that I am likely to take action to pursue acquiring/achieving the subject of that wanting. But if I say "I am wanting", you can take some solace (or not) in knowing that I have not internalized that "wanting" into any formulated action. In the language of the 10 commandments, it is the subtle distinction between finding your house or wife attractive/compelling/desireable and actually finding myself making plans to move in and shag her first chance I get. Yahweh didn't have PowerPoint and a numerically controlled stone chisel to put in these subtleties with sub-bullet points? Or were those tablets clay, suggesting a 3d deposition printer instead?

In the case at hand (Nick's want or wanting), I would say he is not asking anyone specifically to take action, to find or create the toolset he is seeking, he is just speculating out loud and probably *hoping* such things already exist or perhaps someone else actually *wants* the toolset enough to create it.

Have I split the dead horse hair enough yet? I am wanting to know (but don't feel compelled to tell me)!

<gurgle>

- Steve

On 10/28/16 4:45 PM, glen ☣ wrote:
On 10/28/2016 03:10 PM, Steven A Smith wrote:
I've always assumed everyone else's does too... So, when one looks at the content of a mailing list like this, they can _see_ trees of threads, right? If not, I highly recommend a modern client. 8^) It helps a lot.
I agree... but I think many/most don't see this view and I don't believe many will obtain one soon nor easily.

It's just Mozilla Thunderbird (well, Icedove on one machine, Thunderbird on another)... It's free and open source, which means anyone can have it if they want it. I also think I remember Eudora having a nice tree-based threaded view. Pretty much any usenet reader has it. So, I'm confused why others wouldn't use such tools.
Maybe you can tell me how "Nick is wanting" structures your thoughts different from "Nick wants"?
I think it is my perceived tentativeness of what I think Nick wants... meaning I'm not sure he knows what he wants or understands the implications of what he wants. I'm not sure about the grammatical or semantic roots of this (why I use "is wanting" over "wants") but it is interesting to me that you can call it out so clearly. Unfortunately I am probably conflating or convolving my own unsureness of what I *think* Nicks wants into what I believe to be his own lack of clarity...

For contrast, I think I would be MUCH less likely to use the same phrasing to describe my understanding of what I *think* YOU want... or Marcus... or many others here who have a crisper sense of confidence in what you are asking/suggesting. Our patron St. Stephen of Guerin, I am *much* more likely to use "he is wanting".... perhaps Renee's "I am wanting" vs "I want" reflects some of this same ambiguity of detail? If she were more precise in her own mind about what she wants, might she be more likely to use the more assertive?

That's intriguing, as is Marcus'. I have noticed (and have the guts to point out for some reason) that lots of people express their thoughts with an external locus of control. My favorite example was when I noticed the CO^2 regulator on our office keg was broken. I asked my partner: What happened to the CO^2? He said "It broke." >8^) I asked for more clarity and he responded something like: "I was <doingsomethingorother> and it fell over and broke." So, I asserted: "Do you mean that you broke it?" And he relented and said "Yes."

Perhaps there is something of that in both your and Marcus' response. It's a kind of removal/abstraction/distancing from any intimate knowledge or clarity surrounding the itch ... left wanting some scratching.

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

Marcus G. Daniels

Re: THREAD BENDING ALERT: Was "Is Bezos a Bozo?" IS NOW"Reading Email exchanges chronologically"

Nick,

Personally, I think there are too many meetings and proceedings of same. There are too many thin papers where it obviously isn't possible to reproduce the result without a lot more context, and where the authors assume already having a lot of knowledge most readers won't have (even with the supplementary material). Consider the cutting-edge articles in Science that run 2 pages! They are nothing more than advertisements. And that's the good stuff. Then there are a lot of papers that are just incrementalism and don't really add any clever new ideas or help other people benefit from the incremental work (e.g. by publishing code or data or device designs). They are publishing for the sake of publishing. I wish they wouldn't. It's a waste of everyone's time. If this list in some small way occasionally makes someone say to themselves, "Rats, I've been scooped", I'd call that a great success.

Marcus

From: Friam <[hidden email]> on behalf of Nick Thompson <[hidden email]>
Sent: Friday, October 28, 2016 11:58:23 PM
To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group'
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] THREAD BENDING ALERT: Was "Is Bezos a Bozo?" IS NOW"Reading Email exchanges chronologically"

Hi, Owen, and all,

You have me right. There’s a big difference between entertaining a question – noodling, if you will – and demanding an answer.

Thanks for all your thoughts.

Nick

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

Sorry to be pedestrian, but how about the OP's desire to convert thread(s) into posts/correspondence?

I take Nick seriously here, it has been his goal from the beginning, right?

-- Owen

On Fri, Oct 28, 2016 at 5:56 PM, Steven A Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

Glen -

I am a Mozilla/Tbird Man myself but am used to many people clinging to very oldschool text-only (or worse?) mail tools. I also don't have any trouble sorting the complexity of comment/response/inlining/inclusion in my head for the most part, but that is how my head works... I think that is excruciating unto impossible for some.

I do acknowledge/agree-to your description of the experience of "to want" vs "to be wanting"... I personally mostly *want* what I want but I also know the feeling of *to be wanting*. It isn't a simple question of expression... it is a deeper experience of association/dissociation and intention IMO.

Your example of the co-worker distancing himself from the responsibilty/agency of "breaking" something is a red herring in this case (I think)... it may be related, but not directly?

I agree that there is a distancing/abstraction from the itch as you put it, but at least in my own case, expressing it as "I am wanting" rather than "I want" is intentional and an attempt to be more responsible or precise about what I mean.

I suppose, a difference between "I want" and "I am wanting" involves actionability. If I tell you "I want" something, you should be put on notice that I am likely to take action to pursue acquiring/achieving the subject of that wanting. But if I say "I am wanting", you can take some solace (or not) in knowing that I have not internalized that "wanting" into any formulated action. In the language of the 10 commandments, it is the subtle distinction between finding your house or wife attractive/compelling/desireable and actually finding myself making plans to move in and shag her first chance I get. Yahweh didn't have PowerPoint and a numerically controlled stone chisel to put in these subtleties with sub-bullet points? Or were those tablets clay, suggesting a 3d deposition printer instead?

In the case at hand (Nick's want or wanting), I would say he is not asking anyone specifically to take action, to find or create the toolset he is seeking, he is just speculating out loud and probably *hoping* such things already exist or perhaps someone else actually *wants* the toolset enough to create it.

Have I split the dead horse hair enough yet? I am wanting to know (but don't feel compelled to tell me)!

<gurgle>

- Steve

On 10/28/16 4:45 PM, glen ☣ wrote:

On 10/28/2016 03:10 PM, Steven A Smith wrote:

I've always assumed everyone else's does too... So, when one looks at the content of a mailing list like this, they can _see_ trees of threads, right? If not, I highly recommend a modern client. 8^) It helps a lot.

I agree... but I think many/most don't see this view and I don't believe many will obtain one soon nor easily.

It's just Mozilla Thunderbird (well, Icedove on one machine, Thunderbird on another)... It's free and open source, which means anyone can have it if they want it. I also think I remember Eudora having a nice tree-based threaded view. Pretty much any usenet reader has it. So, I'm confused why others wouldn't use such tools.

Maybe you can tell me how "Nick is wanting" structures your thoughts different from "Nick wants"?

I think it is my perceived tentativeness of what I think Nick wants... meaning I'm not sure he knows what he wants or understands the implications of what he wants. I'm not sure about the grammatical or semantic roots of this (why I use "is wanting" over "wants") but it is interesting to me that you can call it out so clearly. Unfortunately I am probably conflating or convolving my own unsureness of what I *think* Nicks wants into what I believe to be his own lack of clarity...

For contrast, I think I would be MUCH less likely to use the same phrasing to describe my understanding of what I *think* YOU want... or Marcus... or many others here who have a crisper sense of confidence in what you are asking/suggesting. Our patron St. Stephen of Guerin, I am *much* more likely to use "he is wanting".... perhaps Renee's "I am wanting" vs "I want" reflects some of this same ambiguity of detail? If she were more precise in her own mind about what she wants, might she be more likely to use the more assertive?

That's intriguing, as is Marcus'. I have noticed (and have the guts to point out for some reason) that lots of people express their thoughts with an external locus of control. My favorite example was when I noticed the CO^2 regulator on our office keg was broken. I asked my partner: What happened to the CO^2? He said "It broke." >8^) I asked for more clarity and he responded something like: "I was <doingsomethingorother> and it fell over and broke." So, I asserted: "Do you mean that you broke it?" And he relented and said "Yes."

Perhaps there is something of that in both your and Marcus' response. It's a kind of removal/abstraction/distancing from any intimate knowledge or clarity surrounding the itch ... left wanting some scratching.

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

Owen Densmore

Re: THREAD BENDING ALERT: Was "Is Bezos a Bozo?" IS NOW"Reading Email exchanges chronologically"

Administrator

In reply to this post by Nick Thompson

I'm pretty sure the best a program could do is clean up and sequence the conversation. There is definitely a man-in-the-middle .. this software would augment your task but not complete it.

-- Owen

On Fri, Oct 28, 2016 at 11:58 PM, Nick Thompson <[hidden email]> wrote:

Hi, Owen, and all,

You have me right. There’s a big difference between entertaining a question – noodling, if you will – and demanding an answer.

Confession time: I come from a world in which success is measured out in published writing. That’s not the only world, but it’s a world. During my 12 years with you folks I have seen a dozen great papers slip through our grasp and into oblivion on the FRIAM list for want of an easy way to transpose our correspondence into coherent text, text that could be read with pleasure by others. I once was an experienced developmental editor …. Several edited collections on various subjects. Every time I read one of these email exchanges I get itchy editorial fingers. In fact, I always get itchy editorial fingers when I see good ideas go to waste.

Owen, you are also correct that I have had this problem for years. When I was a professor I spent a lot of time working with the writing of students. I had a terrible time getting student to think of themselves as the sort of creatures who had ideas about the world which they needed to defend in writing. I had an even worse time trying to convince them that people who disagreed with them were their great allies in developing an argument. They saw papers as something you wrote to make professors happy, not as vehicles for changing the thoughts of others. But to my joy, when email distribution lists came around, I got them to argue in email because they didn’t think of email as Writing. In email, they found it easier to argue as if the arguments made a difference. But I never could get them to take the next step and edit their correspondence into collaborative writing. I had to settle for letting them present their email-arguments, reprinted in sequence, in lieu of final papers, which I did, reluctantly, for years.

Even since that time, I have wondered what if a software could be invented that would re-present an email discussion in its rhetorical order, so that email correspondence could readily be seen as a step to the development of published writing that convinces. Would such a software unleash a flood of collaboration? I dunno, but I would love to see.

By the way, I have found the discussion about the “grammar of wanting” very interesting. It is the kind of issue that normally would lead me to join you in the wallow, but I haven’t been feeling all that well, lately, and there has been lots of incoming, so I have had to watch from the shore. Let me just say that I think that each of those ways of wanting corresponds to a different higher order pattern of behavior, and that all of you are as privileged as I to decide which kind of wanting I have been engaging in.

Thanks for all your thoughts.

Nick

Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology
Clark University
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Owen Densmore
Sent: Friday, October 28, 2016 8:28 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] THREAD BENDING ALERT: Was "Is Bezos a Bozo?" IS NOW"Reading Email exchanges chronologically"

Sorry to be pedestrian, but how about the OP's desire to convert thread(s) into posts/correspondence?

I take Nick seriously here, it has been his goal from the beginning, right?

-- Owen

On Fri, Oct 28, 2016 at 5:56 PM, Steven A Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:
Glen -

I am a Mozilla/Tbird Man myself but am used to many people clinging to very oldschool text-only (or worse?) mail tools. I also don't have any trouble sorting the complexity of comment/response/inlining/inclusion in my head for the most part, but that is how my head works... I think that is excruciating unto impossible for some.

I do acknowledge/agree-to your description of the experience of "to want" vs "to be wanting"... I personally mostly *want* what I want but I also know the feeling of *to be wanting*. It isn't a simple question of expression... it is a deeper experience of association/dissociation and intention IMO.

Your example of the co-worker distancing himself from the responsibilty/agency of "breaking" something is a red herring in this case (I think)... it may be related, but not directly?

I agree that there is a distancing/abstraction from the itch as you put it, but at least in my own case, expressing it as "I am wanting" rather than "I want" is intentional and an attempt to be more responsible or precise about what I mean.

I suppose, a difference between "I want" and "I am wanting" involves actionability. If I tell you "I want" something, you should be put on notice that I am likely to take action to pursue acquiring/achieving the subject of that wanting. But if I say "I am wanting", you can take some solace (or not) in knowing that I have not internalized that "wanting" into any formulated action. In the language of the 10 commandments, it is the subtle distinction between finding your house or wife attractive/compelling/desireable and actually finding myself making plans to move in and shag her first chance I get. Yahweh didn't have PowerPoint and a numerically controlled stone chisel to put in these subtleties with sub-bullet points? Or were those tablets clay, suggesting a 3d deposition printer instead?

In the case at hand (Nick's want or wanting), I would say he is not asking anyone specifically to take action, to find or create the toolset he is seeking, he is just speculating out loud and probably *hoping* such things already exist or perhaps someone else actually *wants* the toolset enough to create it.

Have I split the dead horse hair enough yet? I am wanting to know (but don't feel compelled to tell me)!

<gurgle>

- Steve

On 10/28/16 4:45 PM, glen ☣ wrote:
On 10/28/2016 03:10 PM, Steven A Smith wrote:
I've always assumed everyone else's does too... So, when one looks at the content of a mailing list like this, they can _see_ trees of threads, right? If not, I highly recommend a modern client. 8^) It helps a lot.
I agree... but I think many/most don't see this view and I don't believe many will obtain one soon nor easily.

It's just Mozilla Thunderbird (well, Icedove on one machine, Thunderbird on another)... It's free and open source, which means anyone can have it if they want it. I also think I remember Eudora having a nice tree-based threaded view. Pretty much any usenet reader has it. So, I'm confused why others wouldn't use such tools.
Maybe you can tell me how "Nick is wanting" structures your thoughts different from "Nick wants"?
I think it is my perceived tentativeness of what I think Nick wants... meaning I'm not sure he knows what he wants or understands the implications of what he wants. I'm not sure about the grammatical or semantic roots of this (why I use "is wanting" over "wants") but it is interesting to me that you can call it out so clearly. Unfortunately I am probably conflating or convolving my own unsureness of what I *think* Nicks wants into what I believe to be his own lack of clarity...

For contrast, I think I would be MUCH less likely to use the same phrasing to describe my understanding of what I *think* YOU want... or Marcus... or many others here who have a crisper sense of confidence in what you are asking/suggesting. Our patron St. Stephen of Guerin, I am *much* more likely to use "he is wanting".... perhaps Renee's "I am wanting" vs "I want" reflects some of this same ambiguity of detail? If she were more precise in her own mind about what she wants, might she be more likely to use the more assertive?

That's intriguing, as is Marcus'. I have noticed (and have the guts to point out for some reason) that lots of people express their thoughts with an external locus of control. My favorite example was when I noticed the CO^2 regulator on our office keg was broken. I asked my partner: What happened to the CO^2? He said "It broke." >8^) I asked for more clarity and he responded something like: "I was <doingsomethingorother> and it fell over and broke." So, I asserted: "Do you mean that you broke it?" And he relented and said "Yes."

Perhaps there is something of that in both your and Marcus' response. It's a kind of removal/abstraction/distancing from any intimate knowledge or clarity surrounding the itch ... left wanting some scratching.

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Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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Steve Smith

Re: THREAD BENDING ALERT: Was "Is Bezos a Bozo?" IS NOW"Reading Email exchanges chronologically"

In reply to this post by Marcus G. Daniels

I am of two minds on this (Marcus' point about too much thin, incremental, even vapid publication)

I can't possibly keep up with the publications that might be of direct relevance to my work, much less within my scope of interest and am sometimes frustrated with the sheer volume and the noise/signal ratio of it. This list has a MUCH higher noise/signal ratio by some measures but as I know many of the members in person or via the discussions here (or their professional publications), I am motivated to track most if not all of it. Because I am interested in *people* and *ideas* as much as I am in *things* and *processes*.

I am *thankful* for the promiscuous publishing sometimes when I am "noodling" on a new idea... I appreciate the likelihood that I will find hints if others have approached the same ideas from *any* angle, much less my own. Of course I *hate* to get scooped, but I *love* to build on the work of others, so it is a fine line between resenting and appreciating all of those who publish (formally or just via ramblings on a list like this) their ideas so promiscuously.

On 10/29/16 8:49 AM, Marcus Daniels wrote:

Nick,

Personally, I think there are too many meetings and proceedings of same. There are too many thin papers where it obviously isn't possible to reproduce the result without a lot more context, and where the authors assume already having a lot of knowledge most readers won't have (even with the supplementary material). Consider the cutting-edge articles in Science that run 2 pages!   They are nothing more than advertisements. And that's the good stuff. Then there are a lot of papers that are just incrementalism and don't really add any clever new ideas or help other people benefit from the incremental work (e.g. by publishing code or data or device designs). They are publishing for the sake of publishing. I wish they wouldn't. It's a waste of everyone's time. If this list in some small way occasionally makes someone say to themselves, "Rats, I've been scooped", I'd call that a great success.

Marcus

From: Friam [hidden email] on behalf of Nick Thompson [hidden email]
Sent: Friday, October 28, 2016 11:58:23 PM
To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group'
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] THREAD BENDING ALERT: Was "Is Bezos a Bozo?" IS NOW"Reading Email exchanges chronologically"

Hi, Owen, and all,

You have me right. There’s a big difference between entertaining a question – noodling, if you will – and demanding an answer.

Confession time: I come from a world in which success is measured out in published writing. That’s not the only world, but it’s a world. During my 12 years with you folks I have seen a dozen great papers slip through our grasp and into oblivion on the FRIAM list for want of an easy way to transpose our correspondence into coherent text, text that could be read with pleasure by others. I once was an experienced developmental editor …. Several edited collections on various subjects. Every time I read one of these email exchanges I get itchy editorial fingers. In fact, I always get itchy editorial fingers when I see good ideas go to waste.

Owen, you are also correct that I have had this problem for years. When I was a professor I spent a lot of time working with the writing of students. I had a terrible time getting student to think of themselves as the sort of creatures who had ideas about the world which they needed to defend in writing. I had an even worse time trying to convince them that people who disagreed with them were their great allies in developing an argument. They saw papers as something you wrote to make professors happy, not as vehicles for changing the thoughts of others. But to my joy, when email distribution lists came around, I got them to argue in email because they didn’t think of email as Writing.   In email, they found it easier to argue as if the arguments made a difference. But I never could get them to take the next step and edit their correspondence into collaborative writing. I had to settle for letting them present their email-arguments, reprinted in sequence, in lieu of final papers, which I did, reluctantly, for years.

Even since that time, I have wondered what if a software could be invented that would re-present an email discussion in its rhetorical order, so that email correspondence could readily be seen as a step to the development of published writing that convinces. Would such a software unleash a flood of collaboration?   I dunno, but I would love to see.

By the way, I have found the discussion about the “grammar of wanting” very interesting. It is the kind of issue that normally would lead me to join you in the wallow, but I haven’t been feeling all that well, lately, and there has been lots of incoming, so I have had to watch from the shore. Let me just say that I think that each of those ways of wanting corresponds to a different higher order pattern of behavior, and that all of you are as privileged as I to decide which kind of wanting I have been engaging in.

Thanks for all your thoughts.

Nick

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

From: Friam [[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Owen Densmore
Sent: Friday, October 28, 2016 8:28 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group [hidden email]
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] THREAD BENDING ALERT: Was "Is Bezos a Bozo?" IS NOW"Reading Email exchanges chronologically"

Sorry to be pedestrian, but how about the OP's desire to convert thread(s) into posts/correspondence?

I take Nick seriously here, it has been his goal from the beginning, right?

-- Owen

On Fri, Oct 28, 2016 at 5:56 PM, Steven A Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

Glen -

I am a Mozilla/Tbird Man myself but am used to many people clinging to very oldschool text-only (or worse?) mail tools. I also don't have any trouble sorting the complexity of comment/response/inlining/inclusion in my head for the most part, but that is how my head works... I think that is excruciating unto impossible for some.

I do acknowledge/agree-to your description of the experience of "to want" vs "to be wanting"... I personally mostly *want* what I want but I also know the feeling of *to be wanting*. It isn't a simple question of expression... it is a deeper experience of association/dissociation and intention IMO.

Your example of the co-worker distancing himself from the responsibilty/agency of "breaking" something is a red herring in this case (I think)... it may be related, but not directly?

I agree that there is a distancing/abstraction from the itch as you put it, but at least in my own case, expressing it as "I am wanting" rather than "I want" is intentional and an attempt to be more responsible or precise about what I mean.

I suppose, a difference between "I want" and "I am wanting" involves actionability. If I tell you "I want" something, you should be put on notice that I am likely to take action to pursue acquiring/achieving the subject of that wanting. But if I say "I am wanting", you can take some solace (or not) in knowing that I have not internalized that "wanting" into any formulated action. In the language of the 10 commandments, it is the subtle distinction between finding your house or wife attractive/compelling/desireable and actually finding myself making plans to move in and shag her first chance I get. Yahweh didn't have PowerPoint and a numerically controlled stone chisel to put in these subtleties with sub-bullet points? Or were those tablets clay, suggesting a 3d deposition printer instead?

In the case at hand (Nick's want or wanting), I would say he is not asking anyone specifically to take action, to find or create the toolset he is seeking, he is just speculating out loud and probably *hoping* such things already exist or perhaps someone else actually *wants* the toolset enough to create it.

Have I split the dead horse hair enough yet? I am wanting to know (but don't feel compelled to tell me)!

<gurgle>

- Steve

On 10/28/16 4:45 PM, glen ☣ wrote:

On 10/28/2016 03:10 PM, Steven A Smith wrote:

I've always assumed everyone else's does too... So, when one looks at the content of a mailing list like this, they can _see_ trees of threads, right? If not, I highly recommend a modern client. 8^) It helps a lot.

I agree... but I think many/most don't see this view and I don't believe many will obtain one soon nor easily.

It's just Mozilla Thunderbird (well, Icedove on one machine, Thunderbird on another)... It's free and open source, which means anyone can have it if they want it. I also think I remember Eudora having a nice tree-based threaded view. Pretty much any usenet reader has it. So, I'm confused why others wouldn't use such tools.

Maybe you can tell me how "Nick is wanting" structures your thoughts different from "Nick wants"?

I think it is my perceived tentativeness of what I think Nick wants... meaning I'm not sure he knows what he wants or understands the implications of what he wants. I'm not sure about the grammatical or semantic roots of this (why I use "is wanting" over "wants") but it is interesting to me that you can call it out so clearly. Unfortunately I am probably conflating or convolving my own unsureness of what I *think* Nicks wants into what I believe to be his own lack of clarity...

For contrast, I think I would be MUCH less likely to use the same phrasing to describe my understanding of what I *think* YOU want... or Marcus... or many others here who have a crisper sense of confidence in what you are asking/suggesting. Our patron St. Stephen of Guerin, I am *much* more likely to use "he is wanting".... perhaps Renee's "I am wanting" vs "I want" reflects some of this same ambiguity of detail? If she were more precise in her own mind about what she wants, might she be more likely to use the more assertive?

That's intriguing, as is Marcus'. I have noticed (and have the guts to point out for some reason) that lots of people express their thoughts with an external locus of control. My favorite example was when I noticed the CO^2 regulator on our office keg was broken. I asked my partner: What happened to the CO^2? He said "It broke." >8^) I asked for more clarity and he responded something like: "I was <doingsomethingorother> and it fell over and broke." So, I asserted: "Do you mean that you broke it?" And he relented and said "Yes."

Perhaps there is something of that in both your and Marcus' response. It's a kind of removal/abstraction/distancing from any intimate knowledge or clarity surrounding the itch ... left wanting some scratching.

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

Nick Thompson

Re: THREAD BENDING ALERT: Was "Is Bezos a Bozo?" IS NOW"Reading Email exchanges chronologically"

In reply to this post by Marcus G. Daniels

Marcus,

I have great sympathy for the notion that there is too much writing and too much publication [and too little reading.] I have often wondered how the academic world would be transformed if each of us were issued with our PhD one hundred blank pages with the understanding that that’s all we get in our career. Furthermore, I wondered if promotion and tenure might be based not on the number of published articles but rather on the number of articles carefully read.

But I also am impressed by the good things that happen when writers strive to archive a coherent and comprehensive representation of their thought.

All the best,

Nick

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Marcus Daniels
Sent: Saturday, October 29, 2016 8:49 AM
To: 'The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group' <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] THREAD BENDING ALERT: Was "Is Bezos a Bozo?" IS NOW"Reading Email exchanges chronologically"

Nick,

Marcus

Hi, Owen, and all,

You have me right. There’s a big difference between entertaining a question – noodling, if you will – and demanding an answer.

Thanks for all your thoughts.

Nick

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

From: Friam [[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Owen Densmore
Sent: Friday, October 28, 2016 8:28 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] THREAD BENDING ALERT: Was "Is Bezos a Bozo?" IS NOW"Reading Email exchanges chronologically"

Sorry to be pedestrian, but how about the OP's desire to convert thread(s) into posts/correspondence?

I take Nick seriously here, it has been his goal from the beginning, right?

-- Owen

On Fri, Oct 28, 2016 at 5:56 PM, Steven A Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

Glen -

I am a Mozilla/Tbird Man myself but am used to many people clinging to very oldschool text-only (or worse?) mail tools. I also don't have any trouble sorting the complexity of comment/response/inlining/inclusion in my head for the most part, but that is how my head works... I think that is excruciating unto impossible for some.

I do acknowledge/agree-to your description of the experience of "to want" vs "to be wanting"... I personally mostly *want* what I want but I also know the feeling of *to be wanting*. It isn't a simple question of expression... it is a deeper experience of association/dissociation and intention IMO.

Your example of the co-worker distancing himself from the responsibilty/agency of "breaking" something is a red herring in this case (I think)... it may be related, but not directly?

I agree that there is a distancing/abstraction from the itch as you put it, but at least in my own case, expressing it as "I am wanting" rather than "I want" is intentional and an attempt to be more responsible or precise about what I mean.

I suppose, a difference between "I want" and "I am wanting" involves actionability. If I tell you "I want" something, you should be put on notice that I am likely to take action to pursue acquiring/achieving the subject of that wanting. But if I say "I am wanting", you can take some solace (or not) in knowing that I have not internalized that "wanting" into any formulated action. In the language of the 10 commandments, it is the subtle distinction between finding your house or wife attractive/compelling/desireable and actually finding myself making plans to move in and shag her first chance I get. Yahweh didn't have PowerPoint and a numerically controlled stone chisel to put in these subtleties with sub-bullet points? Or were those tablets clay, suggesting a 3d deposition printer instead?

In the case at hand (Nick's want or wanting), I would say he is not asking anyone specifically to take action, to find or create the toolset he is seeking, he is just speculating out loud and probably *hoping* such things already exist or perhaps someone else actually *wants* the toolset enough to create it.

Have I split the dead horse hair enough yet? I am wanting to know (but don't feel compelled to tell me)!

<gurgle>

- Steve

On 10/28/16 4:45 PM, glen ☣ wrote:
On 10/28/2016 03:10 PM, Steven A Smith wrote:
I've always assumed everyone else's does too... So, when one looks at the content of a mailing list like this, they can _see_ trees of threads, right? If not, I highly recommend a modern client. 8^) It helps a lot.
I agree... but I think many/most don't see this view and I don't believe many will obtain one soon nor easily.

It's just Mozilla Thunderbird (well, Icedove on one machine, Thunderbird on another)... It's free and open source, which means anyone can have it if they want it. I also think I remember Eudora having a nice tree-based threaded view. Pretty much any usenet reader has it. So, I'm confused why others wouldn't use such tools.
Maybe you can tell me how "Nick is wanting" structures your thoughts different from "Nick wants"?
I think it is my perceived tentativeness of what I think Nick wants... meaning I'm not sure he knows what he wants or understands the implications of what he wants. I'm not sure about the grammatical or semantic roots of this (why I use "is wanting" over "wants") but it is interesting to me that you can call it out so clearly. Unfortunately I am probably conflating or convolving my own unsureness of what I *think* Nicks wants into what I believe to be his own lack of clarity...

For contrast, I think I would be MUCH less likely to use the same phrasing to describe my understanding of what I *think* YOU want... or Marcus... or many others here who have a crisper sense of confidence in what you are asking/suggesting. Our patron St. Stephen of Guerin, I am *much* more likely to use "he is wanting".... perhaps Renee's "I am wanting" vs "I want" reflects some of this same ambiguity of detail? If she were more precise in her own mind about what she wants, might she be more likely to use the more assertive?

That's intriguing, as is Marcus'. I have noticed (and have the guts to point out for some reason) that lots of people express their thoughts with an external locus of control. My favorite example was when I noticed the CO^2 regulator on our office keg was broken. I asked my partner: What happened to the CO^2? He said "It broke." >8^) I asked for more clarity and he responded something like: "I was <doingsomethingorother> and it fell over and broke." So, I asserted: "Do you mean that you broke it?" And he relented and said "Yes."

Perhaps there is something of that in both your and Marcus' response. It's a kind of removal/abstraction/distancing from any intimate knowledge or clarity surrounding the itch ... left wanting some scratching.

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

gepr

Re: THREAD BENDING ALERT: Was "Is Bezos a Bozo?" IS NOW"Reading Email exchanges chronologically"

In reply to this post by Owen Densmore

On October 28, 2016 7:28:22 PM PDT, Owen Densmore <[hidden email]> wrote:
>Sorry to be pedestrian, but how about the OP's desire to convert
>thread(s)
>into posts/correspondence?

But that was my point in mentioning a tree threaded mail reader, especially an open source one. It should be a matter of straightforward engineering to extract the part of tbird that makes a tree out of a thread. That code could be the launch point for a tool to do what we want.

Determining whether a line prefixed with the quote char is intentionally quoted or detritus should be easy enough. If all remaining text after the nonquoted part is quoted, then it can be tossed. But if there is a quoted part followed by a nonquoted part, it should remain.

I really think 80 to 90 % of what Nick wants exists. But there's no incentive to do that work. And the amount of work to go from 80% to 100% is always large.

--
glen

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uǝʃƃ ⊥ glen

Eric Charles-2

Re: THREAD BENDING ALERT: Was "Is Bezos a Bozo?" IS NOW"Reading Email exchanges chronologically"

Not to burst bubbles....

Isn't this one of the challenges that Google Wave was intended to solve? Admittedly, Wave isn't a way to fix old email threads, but if "turning email threads into documents" was a common desire, Wave would have been more popular.

For those not familiar: Wave basically started with an email/online doc, and then allowed you to write as if you were adding to a thread, along with infinite larding and responding to larded comments, and simply displayed them all as a tracked-changes multi-authored document (where you could go back in time to see edits). I managed to muscle Nick into co-authoring a publication using Wave, after goading him with chunks of text cut and pasted from earlier FRIAM email threads. I am, frankly, surprised that some of the associated abilities haven't been integrated into Gmail. A few of the capabilities were taken into Google docs, but those capabilities are painfully limited compared what was available in Wave. At this point, Wave lays peacefully in the Google Graveyard, as the Apache Foundation sort of picked it up, but, from what I can tell, hasn't done much with it for the past 6 years.

-----------
Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Supervisory Survey Statistician

U.S. Marine Corps

[hidden email]

On Sat, Oct 29, 2016 at 8:02 PM, glen ep ropella <[hidden email]> wrote:

On October 28, 2016 7:28:22 PM PDT, Owen Densmore <[hidden email]> wrote:
>Sorry to be pedestrian, but how about the OP's desire to convert
>thread(s)
>into posts/correspondence?

But that was my point in mentioning a tree threaded mail reader, especially an open source one. It should be a matter of straightforward engineering to extract the part of tbird that makes a tree out of a thread. That code could be the launch point for a tool to do what we want.

Determining whether a line prefixed with the quote char is intentionally quoted or detritus should be easy enough. If all remaining text after the nonquoted part is quoted, then it can be tossed. But if there is a quoted part followed by a nonquoted part, it should remain.

I really think 80 to 90 % of what Nick wants exists. But there's no incentive to do that work. And the amount of work to go from 80% to 100% is always large.

--
glen

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FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
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Nick Thompson

Re: THREAD BENDING ALERT: Was "Is Bezos a Bozo?" IS NOW"Reading Email exchanges chronologically"

Eric,

I never knew we were working in WAVE. I just knew I was grateful for the help you were giving me ordering my thoughts. I will look into it. Is it capable of reconstructing a thread after the fact, or is it a system for creating threads that can be reconstructed?

Nick

Nicholas S. Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology

Clark University

http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/

From: Friam [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Eric Charles
Sent: Monday, October 31, 2016 6:37 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <[hidden email]>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] THREAD BENDING ALERT: Was "Is Bezos a Bozo?" IS NOW"Reading Email exchanges chronologically"

Not to burst bubbles....

-----------
Eric P. Charles, Ph.D.
Supervisory Survey Statistician

U.S. Marine Corps

On Sat, Oct 29, 2016 at 8:02 PM, glen ep ropella <[hidden email]> wrote:

On October 28, 2016 7:28:22 PM PDT, Owen Densmore <[hidden email]> wrote:
>Sorry to be pedestrian, but how about the OP's desire to convert
>thread(s)
>into posts/correspondence?

But that was my point in mentioning a tree threaded mail reader, especially an open source one. It should be a matter of straightforward engineering to extract the part of tbird that makes a tree out of a thread. That code could be the launch point for a tool to do what we want.

Determining whether a line prefixed with the quote char is intentionally quoted or detritus should be easy enough. If all remaining text after the nonquoted part is quoted, then it can be tossed. But if there is a quoted part followed by a nonquoted part, it should remain.

I really think 80 to 90 % of what Nick wants exists. But there's no incentive to do that work. And the amount of work to go from 80% to 100% is always large.

--
glen

============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com