I'll leave aside the question of where they got 16 billion emails and pause for a moment to ponder the implications of this: "Human e-mailing behavior is so predictable that computer scientists have created an algorithm that can calculate when an e-mail thread is about to end." (I really thing 'created' is the wrong word here - I think the appropriate word is 'found'.) If we're that predictable, what does it say about us? It used to be that one of the major objections to causal theories of the world was the apparent phenomenon of free will. But suppose the data tells us it's just an illusion. If - if they can tell us when an email thread is about to end, is there any way to telling us whether anyone learned anything from it? See the full report here.
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