An interactive version of the extropians mailing list
Claude & I vibecoded an interface for the extropians mailing list. It’s live! Have a look here: https://extropians.boydkane.com/.
From Wikipedia, discussing the extropians mailing list:
In the 90s, the Extropy Institute launched an email mailing listserv through which members could receive updates from the institute and have conversations about extropianism with other members. Notable members include:
Julian Assange
Nick Bostrom
Wei Dai
Eric Drexler
Hal Finney
Robin Hanson
Todd Huffman
Marvin Minsky
Ray Kurzweil
Nick Szabo
Eliezer Yudkowsky
I got curious about this mailing forum. There’s an index hosted by one of the original participants Wei Dai here, but it’s not easy to navigate, and there’s a dump of all the data here but that’s just the raw data.
There’s 130k messages spread out over ~8 years from 2k unique authors, discussing topics including mars, cryonics, nanotech, morality, AI, politics, etc.
I also took the time to embed all 130k messages and then project them via UMAP:
If you hover over a message, it’ll highlight the other messages in that thread:
This is just running on a smol server, so there’s no semantic search, but I did pre-cluster the embeddings and label them, so you can search for specific clusters.
All messages also have tags (that are just based on keywords) so you can filter by that as well.
You can view message threads:
Or the messages sent by a particular author (I’ve also linked their Wikipedia/personal website when appropriate):
Most of the links have rot in the past 20 years, so all URLs have a box emoji 📦 that’ll take you to the wayback machine to see if there’s an archived version.
Most mailing lists would explicitly quote who they were responding to, so I’ve tidied that up a little bit:
And finally, because the times and jargon have changed (e.g. GMI—Guaranteed Minimal Income), there’s a glossary:
Which will give you definitions on hover for those words in the glossary:
I hope this is interesting to at least some of you, I know I’ve had some fun having a look back through time. Give it a go: https://extropians.boydkane.com/.
Edit: After making this post, Adrian Tymes let me know about the revamped mailing list available here, I’ve updated the explorer with these more recent threads (so there’s now 256k messages over 20 years). I also added a 3D embedding explorer and made the explorer faster (:
That is a great representation of a great piece of human culture! For some reason, AI doom made me appreciate history of transhumanism/rationality more. I myself try to preserve some parts of it.
Reading extropians is simultaneously epistemological, cultural, and historical experience. As a member of a younger generation, I strongly recommend to other members of my generation!
Glad you like it! I’ve found it very interesting having a look and exploring correct/incorrect predictions
Do you think you can add the modern version of the Extropians list? https://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/ picks up about a year and a half after http://extropians.weidai.com/ leaves off.
Oh interesting! I didn’t realise there was another archive. Is this “canonical” in some sense? My understanding was that the original extropians list kinda fizzled out, does this modern version keep the same vibe/discussions/ideas?
It is canonical in practically every sense. The old list ran into technical hiccups, then got reconstituted on a new platform.
Check my name in your tool. I was there on the old list. I saw it transition. Check the first month of posts on the new list, and you’ll see me posting there too. If my evidence alone is not enough, check the names of other posters: I suspect that most of the most common old list posters you’ll check will show up on the new list too.
It is true that some of the most recent discussions have a different vibe than the old list’s, as some of the predictions have started to come true. (For instance, it was one thing to discuss self-improving AI as a future hypothetical, but it is another to discuss it when there are at least technically qualifying examples of it in public evidence at the time of discussion. Also, recent politics have risen as a substantial risk factor to certain scenarios.) But there remains at least some futurism, and some of us continue to try to build the future in our own ways, to varying degrees of success.
Okay cool! I’ll add the new archive. Not sure if I can promise to regularly update it though.
EDIT: done! I also added 3D embeddings and made the embeddings map faster to handle the 256k messages.
Please let individual emails open in a new tab or at least let there be a button to return to the previous page in the list of emails.
Can you say more/share screenshots? I think if you ctrl-click it should open in a new tab, or are you wanting it to always open in a new tab?