Thanks so much Filipe, and I’m excited to see your thoughts on the topic. I think this kind of imagining is highly valuable.
I don’t have much context about you personally, but from my engineering and entrepreneurial experience, my main piece of feedback would be that I get the sense that you think this might be a whole lot easier than I think it would be. Something like what you propose sounds very interesting, but I think this initial proposal would be challenging to do well without tons of money and time. I’ve seen my fair share of people start far overambitious projects, totally (though predictably) fail, and be heartbroken as a result.
I think it’s worthwhile to do the following, but think about them in distinct buckets: 1) Imagine what great systems would be like with near unbounded resources. 2) Figure out what pragmatic steps we can take in the short term to get started.
Both of these are valuable. All of my post was in the former camp, and I would suggest that your post mostly is as well.
Some thoughts on the comment, in the vein of category (1):
Translators in the platform could give a score (from 0 to 10) of how good that translation looked for different translation formats
This is a minor point, but I would suggest a system where people rank who good the translation is for individual people (with many defined attributes), instead of trying to bucket things into different categories. Defining the categories is a really messy process that will leave artifacts. This is kind of a classic ML prediction sort of problem.
Thus, we could create a market for expansive translations focused on people of different styles.
I think that the current infrastructure for setting up markets in the regular ways are quite mediocre. Another option would be to hire a team of translators working full-time, but monitor and optimize their performance.
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On the topic of obtaining source data, using new content generation would be very expensive, and I could imagine it being difficult to do well. I think the word for “expansive translators” isn’t “translator”, but “communicator”, for instance, so the people to learn from are the popular communicators, not people with translation experience.
I think there’s already a lot of content out there if you’re a bit creative. There are probably tens of thousands of “What is Bitcoin” posts on YouTube and other platforms aimed at a wide variety of audiences, combined with metrics for how popular these are. If you could find ways of learning from those, I would be more optimistic.
Our new expansive-translations dot com, ou our new chrome extension.
Arbital had features kind of like what I’m suggesting. They identified a need, but found it very challenging to get people to actually do the writing. I suggest checking out the comments from that thread to learn about their experiences.
I’d be enthusiastic about making browser extensions to augment LessWrong in some key ways. It’s possible translation could start small; like with the replacement (hopefully with hovers that demonstrate this) of some key words with words one may better know.
Thanks so much Filipe, and I’m excited to see your thoughts on the topic. I think this kind of imagining is highly valuable.
I don’t have much context about you personally, but from my engineering and entrepreneurial experience, my main piece of feedback would be that I get the sense that you think this might be a whole lot easier than I think it would be. Something like what you propose sounds very interesting, but I think this initial proposal would be challenging to do well without tons of money and time. I’ve seen my fair share of people start far overambitious projects, totally (though predictably) fail, and be heartbroken as a result.
I think it’s worthwhile to do the following, but think about them in distinct buckets:
1) Imagine what great systems would be like with near unbounded resources.
2) Figure out what pragmatic steps we can take in the short term to get started.
Both of these are valuable. All of my post was in the former camp, and I would suggest that your post mostly is as well.
Some thoughts on the comment, in the vein of category (1):
This is a minor point, but I would suggest a system where people rank who good the translation is for individual people (with many defined attributes), instead of trying to bucket things into different categories. Defining the categories is a really messy process that will leave artifacts. This is kind of a classic ML prediction sort of problem.
I think that the current infrastructure for setting up markets in the regular ways are quite mediocre. Another option would be to hire a team of translators working full-time, but monitor and optimize their performance.
---
On the topic of obtaining source data, using new content generation would be very expensive, and I could imagine it being difficult to do well. I think the word for “expansive translators” isn’t “translator”, but “communicator”, for instance, so the people to learn from are the popular communicators, not people with translation experience.
I think there’s already a lot of content out there if you’re a bit creative. There are probably tens of thousands of “What is Bitcoin” posts on YouTube and other platforms aimed at a wide variety of audiences, combined with metrics for how popular these are. If you could find ways of learning from those, I would be more optimistic.
Arbital had features kind of like what I’m suggesting. They identified a need, but found it very challenging to get people to actually do the writing. I suggest checking out the comments from that thread to learn about their experiences.
I’d be enthusiastic about making browser extensions to augment LessWrong in some key ways. It’s possible translation could start small; like with the replacement (hopefully with hovers that demonstrate this) of some key words with words one may better know.