[Inquiry] Re: Inquiry: Nature Of Collaboration

[Jon Awbrey]

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EW = Elijah Wright
JA = Jon Awbrey

JA: To avoid this, it seems necessary to maintain a genuine public interface
    at all times, partly to stay honest, as a source of critical reflection
    and to fund reality checking, and partly to keep fresh, as a source of
    new ideas and a pool of creative reflections.

EW: yes.  as long as the data is google-able, things are out in the open.
    this is a good thing about both the WWW and usenet news.  this is
    a problem with solutions like shared IMAP mail folders, which are
    convenient but not as open as one would like.  (I don't think
    google is capable of searching them, cause they run on
    a protocol it doesn't understand...)

I am now already heavily dependent on Google to remember what I was thinking
about a week, a month, a year ago -- and if there's a file on my disk drive
that I also distributed somewhere, I can always "recollect" it faster with
Google than I can find it again with Windows Find.

JA: Work, real work, on real problems, is often very difficult and even distressing.
    Now, we can always at least begin by bringing together people who are prepared to
    work together, because they already have in common seeing the need to solve certain
    problems.  In the beginning, then, everybody in the group "gets it", not the answer,
    but at least the question.

EW: *nod*  but what to do about the signal-to-noise ration?  groups without
    a chief killer-of-non-content seem to tend to fill up with rubbish fairly
    quickly.  and asking individual users to deal with spamfilters and other
    machinery makes the group less useful to each one of them.  (especially if
    they don't have a clue about how to use them, which is often the case ...)

I guess I was a bit far down the road there.  And maybe trying to digest some
raw experiences that are tougher for me to understand than mere canned spam,
dyspepsia, and the occasional distraction.  They have spam filters on the
Gmane site, and list memberships seem easy enough to control.  Right now
we would be lucky to get anybody else interested in the task of building
honest-to-Peirce inquiry software -- believe me I know!  I am a bit more
worried about the other branch of the dynamics, where it turns out that
the safe thing to do -- at least it always seems like the safe thing
in the short run -- is just for everybody to go back o ignoring the
problem that they once thought was crucial or interesting enough
to work on.

JA: medium will live up to its promise if we don't find new ways to address
    these issues, and it's not the tech, it's the touch, as they used say
    in some circles.

EW: right.  and the 'touch' is something that is not understood by very many
    people.  i consider my own understanding of it to be fairly rudimentary,
    but know that it is quite a bit more sophisticated than the Average Bear
    in the world.

JA: Oh well, just some random thoughts, while I work up the energy to start
    re-assembling my old Theme One Program, the main ideas of which I will
    try to explain in a way that is abstracted away from the specifics of
    Pascal, in a very functional-generic way.

EW: is this the same program that you sent me a copy of several years ago?
    i can't remember, and never got around to doing anything with what you
    sent me.

Yes, I think so.  When Nexist was going strong, I was able to start creating a really
detailed annotation and exposition of it, with hyper-linked comments and glosses and
links that exploded the whole "pattern of calls".  So I will see what I can salvage
of that from my Notepad files.  This is where all my best ideas about integrating
empirical (data-driven) and rational (concept-driven) models of inquiry and
modalities of intelligent functioning in general have been tucked away.
It's not likely that I'm going to learn another language at this time,
but maybe I can lay it out in a way that will be portable, I hope.

Jon

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