MIRI’s difficulty providing a coherent argument to predisposed insiders for its value is more worrying than its difficulty working with outsiders or even its actual value. Note: that’s a value of “difficulty working with outsiders” that assumes over six-to-nine months to get the Sequences eBook proofread and into a norm-palatable format. ((And, yes, I realize that I could and should help with this problem instead of just complaining about it.))
I agree, and it’s something I could, maybe should, help with instead of just complaining about. What’s stopping you from doing this? If you know someone else was actively doing the same, and could keep you committed to the goal in some way, would that help? If that didn’t work, then, what would be stopping us?
What’s stopping you from doing this? If you know someone else was actively doing the same, and could keep you committed to the goal in some way, would that help? If that didn’t work, then, what would be stopping us?
In organized form, I’ve joining the Youtopia page, and the current efforts appear to be either busywork or best completed by a native speaker of a different language, there’s no obvious organization regarding generalized goals, and no news updates at all. I’m not sure if this is because MIRI is using a different format to organize volunteers, because MIRI doesn’t promote the Youtopia group that seriously, because MIRI doesn’t have any current long-term projects that can be easily presented to volunteers, or for some other reason.
For individual-oriented work, I’m not sure what to do, and I’m not confident the best person to do it. There are also three separate issues, of which there’s not obvious interrelation. Improving the Sequences and accessibility of the Sequences is the most immediate and obvious thing, and I can think of a couple different ways to go about this :
The obvious first step is to make /any/ eBook, which is why a number of people have done just that. This isn’t much more comprehensible than just linking to the Sequences page on the Wiki, and in some cases may be less useful, and most of the other projects seem better-designed than I can offer.
Improve indexing of the Sequences for online access. This does seem like low-hanging fruit, possibly because people are waiting for a canonical order, and the current ordering is terrible. However, I don’t think it’s a good idea to just randomly edit the Sequences Wiki page, and Discussion and Main aren’t really well-formatted for a long-term version-heavy discussion. (And it seems not Wise for my first Discussion or Main post to be “shake up the local textbook!”) I have started working on a dependency web, but this effort doesn’t seem produce marginal benefits until large sections are completed.
The Sequences themselves are written as short bite-sized pieces for a generalized audience in a specific context, which may not be optimal for long-form reading in a general context. In some cases, components that were good-enough to start with now have clearer explanations… that have circular redundancies. Writing bridge pieces to cover these attributes, or writing alternative descriptions for the more insider-centric Sequences, works within existing structures, and providing benefit at fairly small intervals. This requires fairly deep understanding of the Sequences, and does not appear to be a low-hanging fruit. (And again, not necessarily Wise for my first Discussion or Main post to be “shake up the local textbook!”)
But this is separate from MIRI’s ability to work with insiders and only marginally associated with its ability to work with outsiders. There are folk with very significant comparative advantages (ie, anyone inside MIRI, anyone in California, most people who accept their axioms) on these matters, and while outsiders have managed to have major impact despite that, they were LukeProg with a low-hanging fruit of basic nonprofit organization, which is a pretty high bar to match.
There are some possibilities—translating prominent posts to remove excessive jargon or wordiness (or even Upgoer Fiving them), working on some reputation problems—but none of these seem to have obvious solutions, and wrong efforts could even have negative impact. See, for example, a lot of coverage in more mainstream web media. I’ve also got a significant anti-academic streak, so it’s a little hard for me to understand the specific concern that Scott Alexander/su3su2u1 were raising, which may complicate matters further.
over six-to-nine months to get the Sequences eBook proofread
This is one of the things that keep me puzzled. How can proofreading a book by a group of volunteers take more time than translating the whole book by a single person?
Is it because people don’t volunteer enough for the work because proofreading seems low status? Is it a bystander effect, where everyone assumes that someone else is already working on it? Are all people just reading LW for fun, but unwilling to do any real work to help? Is it a communication problem, where MIRI has a lack of volunteers, but the potential volunteers are not aware of it?
Just print the whole fucking thing on paper, each chapter separately. Bring the papers to a LW meetup, and ask people to spend 30 minutes proofreading some chapter. Assuming many of them haven’t read the whole Sequences, they can just pick a chapter they haven’t read yet, and just read it, while marking the found errors on the paper. Put a signature at the end of the chapter, so it is known how many people have seen it.
I used to work as a proofreader for MIRI, and was sometimes given documents with volunteers’ comments to help me out. In most cases, the quality of the comments was poor enough that in the time it took me to review the comments, decide which ones were valid, and apply the changes, I could have just read the whole thing and caught the same errors (or at least an equivalent number thereof) myself.
There’s also the fact that many errors are only such because they’re inconsistent with the overall style. It’s presumably not practical to get all your volunteers to read the Chicago Manual of Style and agree on what gets a hyphen and such before doing anything.
How can proofreading a book by a group of volunteers take more time than translating the whole book by a single person?
It’s the ‘norm-palatable’ part more than the proofreading aspect, unfortunately, and I’m not sure that can be readily made volunteer work
As far as I can tell, the proofreading part began in late 2013, and involved over two thousand pages of content to proofread through Youtopia. As far as I can tell, the only Sequence-related volunteer work on the Youtopia site involves translation into non-English languages, so the public volunteer proofreading is done and likely has been done for a while (wild guess, probably somewhere in mid-summer 2014?). MIRI is likely focusing on layout and similar publishing-level issues, and as far as I’ve been able to tell, they’re looking for a release at the end of the year that strongly suggests that they’ve finished the proofreading aspect.
That said, I may have outdated information: the Sequence eBook has been renamed several times in progress for a variety of good reasons, and I’m not sure Youtopia is the current place most of this is going on, and AlexVermeer may or may not be lead on this project and may or not be more active elsewhere than these forums. There are some public project attempts to make an eReader-compatible version, though these don’t seem much stronger from a reading order perspective.
In fairness, doing /good/ layout and ePublishing does take more specialized skills and some significant time, and MIRI may be rewriting portions of the work to better handle the limitations of a book format—where links are less powerful tools, where a large portion of viewer devices support only grayscale, and where certain media presentation formats aren’t possible. At least from what I’ve seen in technical writing and pen-and-paper RPGs, this is not a helpfully parallel task: everyone needs must use the same toolset and design rules, or all of their work is wasted. There was also a large amount of internal MIRI rewriting involved, as even the early version made available to volunteer proofreaders was significantly edited.
Less charitably, while trying to find this information I’ve found references to an eBook project dating back to late 2012, so nine months may be a low-end estimate. Not sure if that’s the same project or if it’s a different one that failed, or if it’s a different one that succeeded and I just can’t find the actual eBook result.
Bring the papers to a LW meetup, and ask people to spend 30 minutes proofreading some chapter. Assuming many of them haven’t read the whole Sequences, they can just pick a chapter they haven’t read yet, and just read it, while marking the found errors on the paper. Put a signature at the end of the chapter, so it is known how many people have seen it.
Thanks for the suggestion. I’ll plan some meetups around this. Not the whole thing, mind you. I’ll just get anyone willing at the weekly Vancouver meetup to do exactly that: take a mild amount of time reviewing a chapter/post, and providing feedback on it or whatever.
I agree, and it’s something I could, maybe should, help with instead of just complaining about. What’s stopping you from doing this? If you know someone else was actively doing the same, and could keep you committed to the goal in some way, would that help? If that didn’t work, then, what would be stopping us?
In organized form, I’ve joining the Youtopia page, and the current efforts appear to be either busywork or best completed by a native speaker of a different language, there’s no obvious organization regarding generalized goals, and no news updates at all. I’m not sure if this is because MIRI is using a different format to organize volunteers, because MIRI doesn’t promote the Youtopia group that seriously, because MIRI doesn’t have any current long-term projects that can be easily presented to volunteers, or for some other reason.
For individual-oriented work, I’m not sure what to do, and I’m not confident the best person to do it. There are also three separate issues, of which there’s not obvious interrelation. Improving the Sequences and accessibility of the Sequences is the most immediate and obvious thing, and I can think of a couple different ways to go about this :
The obvious first step is to make /any/ eBook, which is why a number of people have done just that. This isn’t much more comprehensible than just linking to the Sequences page on the Wiki, and in some cases may be less useful, and most of the other projects seem better-designed than I can offer.
Improve indexing of the Sequences for online access. This does seem like low-hanging fruit, possibly because people are waiting for a canonical order, and the current ordering is terrible. However, I don’t think it’s a good idea to just randomly edit the Sequences Wiki page, and Discussion and Main aren’t really well-formatted for a long-term version-heavy discussion. (And it seems not Wise for my first Discussion or Main post to be “shake up the local textbook!”) I have started working on a dependency web, but this effort doesn’t seem produce marginal benefits until large sections are completed.
The Sequences themselves are written as short bite-sized pieces for a generalized audience in a specific context, which may not be optimal for long-form reading in a general context. In some cases, components that were good-enough to start with now have clearer explanations… that have circular redundancies. Writing bridge pieces to cover these attributes, or writing alternative descriptions for the more insider-centric Sequences, works within existing structures, and providing benefit at fairly small intervals. This requires fairly deep understanding of the Sequences, and does not appear to be a low-hanging fruit. (And again, not necessarily Wise for my first Discussion or Main post to be “shake up the local textbook!”)
But this is separate from MIRI’s ability to work with insiders and only marginally associated with its ability to work with outsiders. There are folk with very significant comparative advantages (ie, anyone inside MIRI, anyone in California, most people who accept their axioms) on these matters, and while outsiders have managed to have major impact despite that, they were LukeProg with a low-hanging fruit of basic nonprofit organization, which is a pretty high bar to match.
There are some possibilities—translating prominent posts to remove excessive jargon or wordiness (or even Upgoer Fiving them), working on some reputation problems—but none of these seem to have obvious solutions, and wrong efforts could even have negative impact. See, for example, a lot of coverage in more mainstream web media. I’ve also got a significant anti-academic streak, so it’s a little hard for me to understand the specific concern that Scott Alexander/su3su2u1 were raising, which may complicate matters further.
This is one of the things that keep me puzzled. How can proofreading a book by a group of volunteers take more time than translating the whole book by a single person?
Is it because people don’t volunteer enough for the work because proofreading seems low status? Is it a bystander effect, where everyone assumes that someone else is already working on it? Are all people just reading LW for fun, but unwilling to do any real work to help? Is it a communication problem, where MIRI has a lack of volunteers, but the potential volunteers are not aware of it?
Just print the whole fucking thing on paper, each chapter separately. Bring the papers to a LW meetup, and ask people to spend 30 minutes proofreading some chapter. Assuming many of them haven’t read the whole Sequences, they can just pick a chapter they haven’t read yet, and just read it, while marking the found errors on the paper. Put a signature at the end of the chapter, so it is known how many people have seen it.
I used to work as a proofreader for MIRI, and was sometimes given documents with volunteers’ comments to help me out. In most cases, the quality of the comments was poor enough that in the time it took me to review the comments, decide which ones were valid, and apply the changes, I could have just read the whole thing and caught the same errors (or at least an equivalent number thereof) myself.
There’s also the fact that many errors are only such because they’re inconsistent with the overall style. It’s presumably not practical to get all your volunteers to read the Chicago Manual of Style and agree on what gets a hyphen and such before doing anything.
I’m just reading LW for fun and unwilling to do any real work to help, FWIW.
It’s the ‘norm-palatable’ part more than the proofreading aspect, unfortunately, and I’m not sure that can be readily made volunteer work
As far as I can tell, the proofreading part began in late 2013, and involved over two thousand pages of content to proofread through Youtopia. As far as I can tell, the only Sequence-related volunteer work on the Youtopia site involves translation into non-English languages, so the public volunteer proofreading is done and likely has been done for a while (wild guess, probably somewhere in mid-summer 2014?). MIRI is likely focusing on layout and similar publishing-level issues, and as far as I’ve been able to tell, they’re looking for a release at the end of the year that strongly suggests that they’ve finished the proofreading aspect.
That said, I may have outdated information: the Sequence eBook has been renamed several times in progress for a variety of good reasons, and I’m not sure Youtopia is the current place most of this is going on, and AlexVermeer may or may not be lead on this project and may or not be more active elsewhere than these forums. There are some public project attempts to make an eReader-compatible version, though these don’t seem much stronger from a reading order perspective.
In fairness, doing /good/ layout and ePublishing does take more specialized skills and some significant time, and MIRI may be rewriting portions of the work to better handle the limitations of a book format—where links are less powerful tools, where a large portion of viewer devices support only grayscale, and where certain media presentation formats aren’t possible. At least from what I’ve seen in technical writing and pen-and-paper RPGs, this is not a helpfully parallel task: everyone needs must use the same toolset and design rules, or all of their work is wasted. There was also a large amount of internal MIRI rewriting involved, as even the early version made available to volunteer proofreaders was significantly edited.
Less charitably, while trying to find this information I’ve found references to an eBook project dating back to late 2012, so nine months may be a low-end estimate. Not sure if that’s the same project or if it’s a different one that failed, or if it’s a different one that succeeded and I just can’t find the actual eBook result.
Thanks for the suggestion. I’ll plan some meetups around this. Not the whole thing, mind you. I’ll just get anyone willing at the weekly Vancouver meetup to do exactly that: take a mild amount of time reviewing a chapter/post, and providing feedback on it or whatever.