The podcast History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps stresses the importance of translations and transmissions of philosophical texts – e.g. Plato was a secondary or tertiary figure in the middle ages at best (with only parts of the Timaios being available), and rose to philosophical prominence in the 14th century only after translations from greek texts that had been preserved in Byzantium were brought to Italy. Similarly, we know that Chrysippus wrote hundreds of texts, ~none of which have survived until today (him being compared to Plato and Aristotle in terms on influence on hellenistic philosophy).
That got me thinking about the importance of translations and preservation of texts around LessWrong. There are translations of the sequences into some languages, but e.g. not Chinese with its 1 bio. speakers (I think there exists a chinese translation of Superintelligence, though).
Translation/preservation is probably undervalued because it is boring and it is hard to signal intelligence/creativity with it (which is probably why I don’t do it either).
Ideas for preservation: LiveJournal Scott Alexander posts (curated, there is a lot of personal information there), Facebook spit posts/discussions, probably some Discord servers (e.g. the Eleuther AI/Bayesian Conspiracy discord, curated as well).
The podcast History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps stresses the importance of translations and transmissions of philosophical texts – e.g. Plato was a secondary or tertiary figure in the middle ages at best (with only parts of the Timaios being available), and rose to philosophical prominence in the 14th century only after translations from greek texts that had been preserved in Byzantium were brought to Italy. Similarly, we know that Chrysippus wrote hundreds of texts, ~none of which have survived until today (him being compared to Plato and Aristotle in terms on influence on hellenistic philosophy).
That got me thinking about the importance of translations and preservation of texts around LessWrong. There are translations of the sequences into some languages, but e.g. not Chinese with its 1 bio. speakers (I think there exists a chinese translation of Superintelligence, though).
There has been some effort to preserve existing writing, e.g. by gwern, of the Novum Organum and of the Felicifia forum.
Translation/preservation is probably undervalued because it is boring and it is hard to signal intelligence/creativity with it (which is probably why I don’t do it either).
Ideas for preservation: LiveJournal Scott Alexander posts (curated, there is a lot of personal information there), Facebook spit posts/discussions, probably some Discord servers (e.g. the Eleuther AI/Bayesian Conspiracy discord, curated as well).
See also Tomasik 2019.