The n-Category Café

Hi Clifford!

and this public aspect was the one that people most objected to

I would think that the way to go is not to ask everybody beforehand and then set up a big system that tries to suit everybody’s needs.

Few people will have any good idea what that mysterious public-research-like-discussion-system would actually be like. I wouldn’t. It has no predecessors.

On the web, the interesting things tend to develop dynamically. Interconnection is more or less automatic (direct hyperlinks, automatic trackbacks, comments, etc.)

We are having an inter-blog discussion here right now. And I imagine if you posted more about your current research to your public blog, or at least about related things, I for one would be highly interested in that and follow it closely. Reading your entry might inspire me to post a related entry here, sending a trackback to yours. And so on.

So, I don’t think we are lacking the technology for a web-wide interactive research-related discussion forum. Currently we are lacking people who would consider contributing.

But more might join in when they see more big shots like you talking about serious research-related stuff (preferably clearly seperated from all those other topics, like politics etc.) on an existing weblog.

genuine fears

Exactly, that’s the problem.

On the other hand, given - as it often happens - that I have some thought which I really need to share (a thought may need more than one mind to grow), then I feel much more secure with posting it to a weblog, where it appears complete with time stamp, electronic signature and all.

This is exactly how things work right now when you have conversations after giving a seminar or during coffee at a workshop or conference.

I wholeheartedly agree with this point – as already indicated in the last sentence of my entry above – that the useful kind of research-related discussion that we could have on blogs is more or less like the one we all enjoy most anyway: namely that taking place over coffee.

That’s, after all, why both the String Coffee Table and the $n$-Category Café have the names they have.

Whether or not such discussion requires lots of equations will depend. There is a reason why good conference places have blackboards in the hallway, since there may be a need to write down a symbol or two to help coordinate the thoughts of those conversing.

(I don’t think you would usually want to write down entire computations into a blog, but you might crucially want to display the central equation that your discussion revolves around.)

Whether or not anonymity is relevant may also depend. On big conferences it often happens that, as people walk here and there and join this or that discussion group, not everybody at every instant knows who everybody else is.

I certainly prefer to know who I am talking to, but if my only choice is talking to somebody anonymously or not talking to him or her at all, I very much prefer the anonymous conversations.

From time to time I receive comments on weblog entries by private email instead of posted to the comment section here. That should not be so. Chances are that somewhere out there is somebody who has an important comment to make on that particular comment, but he will never do so when it rests hidden in my private mailbox.

Therefore, I strongly encourage everybody here to post comments anonymously if that’s the only reasonable alternative to not posting at all.

An administrative comment in this respect: the comment edit window of the $n$-Café asks you for a name, an email address and a web address.

The name is what will be displayed. Put a pseudonym here if you desire. It will be hyperlinked to the web address given. Specify no such address if not desired.

The email address, however, will not be displayed in any case on the public pages of this blog. It will be visible, though, to the hosts of this blog, which includes, as you know, John, David and myself (and I guess Jacques can see everything, anyway).

So, if you feel like the hosts should know who you are, give your email address and then choose if the public will get to know your true name or just a pseudonym. If you feel nobody at all should know the name behind your comment - very well - just give some bogus email address.

…I’d like to see more of in a global conversation, for the good of the field.

Never far from the scene is the language of Aristotelian ethics, two of whose central components are the notions of goods and virtues.

An acknowledgement of which conversation inspired them to figure it out would be nice and maybe even useful…

It would also be just. A failure to acknowledge displays a lack of the virtue of justice.

If a fully-fledged Aristotelian account of a tradition of intellectual enquiry is to be considered here, we should want to think about the good of mathematics/mathematical physics, both internal and external, and the good of the individual researcher as a member of a research community and of a political community. E.g., what does it mean for John to adopt a ‘gift economy’ with regard to his research, when his daily bread is provided by a capitalist economy? Is there an incompatibility between why a modern nation state thinks it should fund mathematics and the reason mathematicians do it? Should I keep my one small idea private when I can see it’s ripe for development by someone with a different background, so that I may later gain more recognition?

Hi Moshe,

I suspect that this issue of public vs private is not the one you’re thinking of. What I’m thinking of (or was in my first post in 2005) was something that was public in the sense that registered users from many different research groups can read and post. Private would mean something like I blogged about in this more recent post: a smaller group of people collaborating together or close to that. Public was not meant to be like the technical discussions we occasionally have on Asymptotia where any fool can come in and yell stupid nonsense -and they do, sadly- and reduce the signal to noise. That is not the public I meant, and I’m guessing that Urs also had that more reduced definition of public in mind too?

Making anonymous posts (as Haelfix suggested) is then also ruled out since you want people to take responsibility for their contributions…. otherwise it again reduces to a pub brawl. Alternatively, you elect one person a moderator who knows who all the anonymous people really are….. this is less than ideal. There should be no such heirarchy for the Conversation, in my opinion.

-cvj

Moshe writes:

More about privacy: I would advocate not merely restricted write access, but also restricted read access. One issue is that in order to feel comfortable making public statements, which may be wrong, or foolish, or controversial, a person would like to know they are talking to friends who are going to take it the right way.

This depends a lot on ones personality. Perhaps most people feel the way you describe. But when I make a statement that may be wrong or foolish, I like to make it in front of the largest audience possible — so I have the greatest chance of being corrected and learning interesting things! That’s why I’ve spent so much time sci.physics.research, writing This Week’s Finds, creating expository webpages, teaching courses online, and posting to the n-Category Café. I’ve learned a huge amount from all these activities, usually by people correcting wrong or foolish statements of mine.

When it comes to controversial statements, I don’t mind making them in a publicly viewable place. But, I avoid making them in a forum that permits easy feedback, because overall I don’t find the feedback useful: when people are hostile, they tend to stop providing corrective information and start providing personal attacks.

So: personality types vary. Instead of taking a specific fixed position on issues of privacy, a good online research environment will provide different options for different personality types. The challenge is helping collaborators with different views on privacy issues work together. Negotiations among the collaborators will always be necessary — but a clearly laid-out, broad menu of options would help a lot.

I now feel like a fool. Having asked (via e-mail) whether the classical mechanics course notes had been put into LaTeX, I switched over to my Firefox window and discover the answer.

I know very little about the innards of the Linux developer community, but on Wikipedia, a significant part of the communication seems to happen via the WikiProjects, such as WikiProject Physics, and their associated talk pages. There is also a great deal of highly decentralized discussion on the talk pages of individual articles and of individual users.

One important way that people know a new article is needed is the redlink. If one article contains a link to a wiki page which does not yet exist, that link shows up red instead of blue (in the default skin). This might also work if somebody set up a course-notes wiki.

I’m not a Linux contributor, but as a computer science guy I can make some comments about Linux. Three important points that maybe don’t apply to research are:

(1) “I need this” – people mostly start working on things because they either need some new functionality, or what’s currently there doesn’t work well for them. Unless you’re signed up to teach a course on something, what you need is more likely to be research based rather than expository.

(2) “Partially objective success criteria” – Whilst there’s a certain amount of review criteria which use subjective things like “long term maintainability”, part of the judgement of quality comes from objectively running the computer code on real machines; if it has problems it clearly isn’t suitable. But suppose I write a review of some subject area, unless I get things really wrong your view on it will be primarily based on subjective criteria like “did I introduce ideas in what you think is the wrong order”, is the style “not to your liking”, have I written about a (valid) approach which isn’t your preferred one? If the feedback you’re sending to a web-collaborator that you don’t really know is of mainly of this form it’s likely they’ll give up. (Indeed, most of the friction in Linux development comes when things technically work but there’s loads of subjective “change requests” that aren’t objectively either right or wrong.)

(3) Lots of the advances in Linux are accumulated small refinements to existing things (maybe even just 2-3 line changes) because these are easier for people to complete and move on from in short amounts of time. In expository text would you be
happy with a document that slowly evolved from a text about basic arithmetic to the distinctions in cardinal and ordinal counting over the course of a couple of years?

As a side remark, note that whilst Open Source coders produce amazing code they aren’t as good at documentation! (Even I haven’t documented my one released program nearly enough.)

I think more collaborative work in science and engineering would be a great thing and Open Source computer software is a good place to take inspiration from.
But I think we all need to think about the analogies and differences between code and exposition.

On another note about blog collaboration, one of the problems I find with talking about my work (in computer vision) is the “critical mass” problem: I’m not particuarly interested in “vague conversations where no-one really engages enough to say anything thought provoking” (to be honest because I find it time consuming without being intellectually rewarding). On the other hand, discussing interesting stuff requires more than a fleeting conversation but a real engagement. That’s why I don’t really find quick conversations at conferences of much interest; spending a couple of hours in a pub or getting stuck next to someone on a train is much more interesting to me. The connection with blogging is: the text of even long blog conversations would take 5-10 minutes to speak. What sociological features would promote longer interactions in the blog/general internet arena? Eg, JB and DC have clearly spent a lot of time doing various 2-geometry stuff: other than the intrinsic interestingness of the subject why did that become a long conversation and other things don’t?

No answers, just food for thought.

Just because you’re a mathematician, doesn’t mean you need to be a lonely old wolf. Cafés have always been popular among mathematicians. But now that the internet, web, and blogs exist, you can learn a lot and have a lot of fun talking to people around the world — without even going to conferences! I would have been really bored in Riverside without the internet.

So, good luck to you and your new blog!