I do think that A & B were both making arguments with the goal of not proceeding down the path…however, they didn’t really have a strong alternative path to suggest.

You’re right that just like anti-aging cream is not a perfect panacea, nor is any one email solution. From a marketing perspective, there are two goals: (1) keep things simple enough to easily digest (2) not promise the impossible since that’s easy enough to detect as impossible and since one of course cannot deliver on it. With AwayFind, we do reduce the problem to a little less complexity than there is, but I don’t think that’s disingenuous, it’s just the role of marketing and general communications best practices. And I don’t believe we overpromise–at the end of the day we’re just trying to make progress toward something. It’s sort of like how a therapist can’t fix someone, but they can make life a little easier to manage. We want to be one piece of the email puzzle, but in the process there is a need to sell a little of the sizzle. That doesn’t seem questionable to me.

-Jared

the former is patently bad advice.

the latter may be true, but they have to factor in rarity and serendipity. The most important threat facing the human race, right now, might be global warming. But if everyone tried to tackle that challenge head one, we’d be completely screwed since at least someone has to keep keep the sewage flowing and the food growing.

The history of technology would suggest that a good deal of serendipity is involved in every major scientific and engineering breakthrough (James Burk’s connections comes to mind).

A direct example on how something (seemingly) small could lead to something huge:
The future of communication, where message creation and transmission takes less than a millisecond, will likely involve evolve to something that resembles telepathy. In such a world, message overload will be a far greater problem than anything we can even conceive of at presence (people will laugh at the idea of spam being something people complain about). Clearly there will be a time where trillions of simultaneously created messages will be accessible (and somewhat useful) to us. In a hive-mind world where we each “know” millions of people, it’s possible that a large fraction of these messages will be directed to us specifically! A complex system of message filters and labels has already begun it’s long evolutionary path. Your work with AwayFind is a good example of a highly controllable system for message importance hierarchy. One of many early steps towards a highly effective hive-mind communication system. Many people say we’re already there, but tell that to me the next time I’m stuck checking email for 3 hours when I should be finishing of a CAD drawing, a BOM or debugging my latest OpenCV project.

Such a system will likely be used to overcome the worlds greatest challenges. Thank you for helping in this effort.

cheers,
Leigh