Keeping track of too many people
Bryan Bishop
Here's another transhuman tool that I should have already made, but
haven't. When my room mate moved in to the apartment last month, my
mother wanted to meet with him, so she came over and we chatted for a
while. Of course, she wanted to know his story, who he was, what he
was doing- all completely natural questions to ask. He mentioned
transhumanism at one point, and she asked, "wait, what's
transhumanism?". This came at a shock to me-- had I honestly totally
forgot to tell her about transhumanism after all these years?
How could that be?
My inbox is out of control: two months ago I had 80,000 unread emails.
Today I have 56,748 unread emails, but only because I started to
shuffle away some of the debian mailing list activity away from the
main inbox. On top of that, there are so many people that I have met
from over the years that it is hard to keep track of. In 2004 I
started to keep track of who I was talking with on AIM and what we
were talking about, and there was something like +20 people/month on
the charts (the charts were generated via gnuplot and gaimgraphs2,
which was originally some perl scripts written by warhorse47- I don't
seem to have any backups of the scripts at the moment, or at least any
working backups).
And then there's everyone that I have been meeting now that I am
enrolled at a university. And then everything else that has been
happening online. Most people suggest that I just stop and limit my
activity to only a certain number of people, however I don't think
that's entirely appropriate. I think it's entirely possible to have
meaningful interaction with an increasing number of people.
So, here's my idea for some software to facilitate this. As a monthly
or some other periodic cron job, I should send emails out to everyone
(individually), including a summary of what we last talked about, some
of the topics that we were talking about (maybe written via orgs-mode
for emacs so that it can be easily parsed), and then some follow-up
questions, asking for updates, etc. This could be done if I simple
write a text file with some notes in a directory somewhere. Then,
these would be used when generating the email to send to everyone each
month. For people that I haven't written to, I could make the cronjob
yell at me to go update the files, etc. With email integration on the
linux side, things are so much smoother.
The other thing to do is what I call a giant communication matrix.
Quite literally, everyone gets a row, and each time some new topic
comes up, a new column is added, and for each (row, column)
intersection, a checkbox as to whether or not to inform that person
about that topic. What this means is that when assembling the emails
to everyone, everyone gets sort of a "personalized recipe" of what
they get to hear from me. This would also allow me to keep track of
what I have told certain people and what I haven't told other people.
For instance, if I was using this sort of system many years ago, I
might notice that my mom isn't getting any of my
transhumanism-related-emails or updates about the things I've been
doing.
Now, someone might say that this seems rather unpersonal, but that's
not entirely true-- the text files that I write would be for each
person and specially tailored to talk about the topics that I talk
about with that person. Everything else relating to the matrix
software is just a way to assemble more content and keep everyone more
or less "on the same page".
I really should be working on this sort of system. It would vastly
improve my communication, I suspect. I sometimes joke with fenn about
Paul Fernhout and his writings on the openmanufacturing mailing list.
Paul is notorious for writing ridiculously long emails (longer than
mine!) continuously for more than ten hours per day. So, if you miss a
day of reading, you have over a week's worth of content to catch up
on, if you're interested in it or something (and it's not always high
signal or high quality unfortunately). And it seems that- because of
the notation that Paul uses with three single apostrophes after every
link- that he might be using some sort of syntax folding in a text
editor or something, because many of the quotes that he uses are the
same across his emails, as if he's using some automatic email
assembler software that he has written. Anyway, it's funny. "Include
standard rant on why post-scarcity is interesting, here" .. and then
the software must be filling it in, because his words are almost
always the same. But, he denies it if you ask him about this. ;-)
It's funny because sometimes people ask me to go a bit lighter on the
topics sent to various mailing lists. Being subscribed to 160+ mailing
lists makes it interesting: which topics go to which mailing lists?
And even then, how much elaboration should go to which mailing list?
Do the people on diybio need to know the same information that I am
compiling for the debian-users community when it comes to a tutorial
on using biopython or some other computational biology software? And
even if the answer is "yes, but only as a link", should those links be
custom tailored for the different audiences?
One idea I had was to come up with a bayesian filtering system for the
mailing lists that I am subscribed to. Kind of like spam filters,
except instead of filtering the mail that I receive, it would filter
the mail that I send out, and associate it to different people and
different mailing lists. When there is a "positive" response, then
that association should be strengthened, and more content like that
should be sent out to those mailing list or those people. However, if
the response is mostly negative, or if I indicate that it was mostly
negative, then maybe that association shouldn't be included.
This way, I could actually figure out what to say to explain certain
things over time, instead of repeatedly bashing my head into a wall.
Anyway, as alway, if anyone is sufficiently interested in this project
to help me out with it, please do. I think this is a very
transhumanist project, and it's definitely something that we could all
DIY, but it's better if we DIY-it-together or something.
Heath Matlock
gnus, bbdb, org-mode, and a few simple scripts. Sacha Chua wrote a
how-to article for LinuxWorld called "Curing email madness with Emacs"
which mentions templating emails using gnus and bbdb.
http://www.linuxworld.com/news/2007/051607-linuxworld-mail-madness.html
"""
Drowning in e-mail? In this article, you'll pick up a few ideas for:
*Dealing with inbox addiction by forcing yourself to do work before
you can check mail.
*Prioritizing mail based on your importance in the recipient list.
*Scoring mail, reading interesting mail first.
*Sending personalized semi-automated e-mail to your friends (so that
they think you care!).
"""
Not sure when org-mode came up, probably on the irc channel sometime,
but it too can be used in organizing and scheduling tasks.So the
following might be of use as well:
Link to Gnus messages by Message-Id
http://orgmode.org/worg/org-hacks.php#sec-12
Org Agenda + Appt + Zenity
http://orgmode.org/worg/org-hacks.php#sec-3
It make[s] sure your agenda appointments are known by Emacs, and it
displays warnings in a zenity popup window.
I'm still in the beginning stages of setting up my Emacs environment
for this type of use. After we've created something like what you've
described, it might be useful to create some how-to for those who
aren't familiar with these programs and are anxious to use such a
system. Sacha's article was intended for intermediate to advanced
Emacs users after all, and this communications setup may prove
difficult to understand for those unfamiliar with these programs.
Heath Matlock
+1 256 274 4225
Bryan Bishop
> Anyway, as alway, if anyone is sufficiently interested in this project
> to help me out with it, please do. I think this is a very
> transhumanist project, and it's definitely something that we could all
> DIY, but it's better if we DIY-it-together or something.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number
"Dunbar's number is a theoretical cognitive limit to the number of
people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships."
"Dunbar's number was first proposed by British anthropologist Robin
Dunbar, who theorized that "this limit is a direct function of
relative neocortex size, and that this in turn limits group size ...
the limit imposed by neocortical processing capacity is simply on the
number of individuals with whom a stable inter-personal relationship
can be maintained." On the periphery, the number also includes past
colleagues such as high school friends with whom a person would want
to reacquaint themselves if they met again."
I don't think it's a limit of neocortex size.
Forrest Flanagan
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