[FRIAM] The first day of the rest of nick's life

[Nicholas Thompson]

All, 

So, today I resigned my tenure and as of 2007 will be living in Santa Fe as of Jan 1 2007.  I still have to finish a semester's teaching and get out there, so I wont have a lot of energy to spare before I get out there, but I would like to start thinking about projects.  

One project that seems particularly worthy, whose working name is the Purple People Project, seeks  to provide a web  "dating service" for people or web "chess club" who want to talk to, argue with, share views with, , people who disagree with them on major issues of the day.   I imagine a web interface which would help people find one another and then structure thier discussions to keep people away from unproductive discourse or perhaps to guide them toward productive discourse.  I think to get it rolling we would need web people, philosophical people, political people.  What I would love to think of is some way in which the site could build itself (or with the help of a Universithy professor with a flock of students looking for something to do) by tracking fruitless lines of argument and developing mechanisms for turning people away from them.  I have the political arrogance to suppose that if arguments can be kept on point, liberal democrats and moderate republicans will win them.  I dont know who would win the 2008 election if we got such a thing going but it wouldnt be Karl Rove.  

Has anybody out there had similar thoughts???  

Nick 


Nicholas Thompson
nickthompson at earthlink.net
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