Edit the Bible. It is the information replicated the most times throughout history, and thus it’s probably the best vehicle for a cultural or intellectual agenda. Finding the right edits would not be easy, because the bible would need to retain the qualities that made it so viral in the first place.
Edits could include reducing mysogeny/anti-LGBTQ, valuing the happiness and suffering of all beings, and putting more faith in reason. Adding more reason could easily undermine the persuasive power of the bible, but something could probably be done.
The bible was written between 0 and 100 AD in Greek, so “the team” of time travellers would need to learn ancient Greek (the known parts now, all the unrecorded parts when they arrived), go back to either 1 or 2 bc and influence early manuscripts / verbal recitations, or perhaps arrive around 50AD and write the official Bible, or influence those who wrote it.
Finding the right edits would not be easy, because the bible would need to retain the qualities that made it so viral in the first place.
IMHO there’s a lot of cruft in there which doesn’t serve virality very well; there’s a huge effect where people pay attention to the parts they like. So, it might be much easier to insert additional messages, rather than edit existing messages. (Although there’s some risk you insert a message so unpopular that it makes the Bible less popular, of course.)
The bible has also been heavily pruned and edited at times, so it might not be so easy to inject things...
For that reason, the Koran seems like a better target for this sort of project. It has been faithfully transmitted from the beginning (to the point of including spelling errors, if I’ve heard correctly).
But I also like the idea of editing Euclid’s Elements. I believe it is the most reproduced book after the bible. Adding an extra part to Euclid’s Elements which discusses axiomatic probability theory and utility theory could be a start (although it’s not clear what the impact of that alone would be).
Probability+utility theory might be recognized as important on its own, so there might not be a big difference between including it in Elements and publishing it as its own volume.
I like the idea of editing the Koran. It spread through conquest earlier in its life than the Bible, so perhaps it’s text isn’t as vital to its success as the Bible’s which had to spread organically more before it was spread by force.
There’s also the issue of great filters: if the great filter is in our recent past, then anything we change would be net negative, and we would be better off not going back far at all.
Edit the Bible. It is the information replicated the most times throughout history, and thus it’s probably the best vehicle for a cultural or intellectual agenda. Finding the right edits would not be easy, because the bible would need to retain the qualities that made it so viral in the first place.
Edits could include reducing mysogeny/anti-LGBTQ, valuing the happiness and suffering of all beings, and putting more faith in reason. Adding more reason could easily undermine the persuasive power of the bible, but something could probably be done.
The bible was written between 0 and 100 AD in Greek, so “the team” of time travellers would need to learn ancient Greek (the known parts now, all the unrecorded parts when they arrived), go back to either 1 or 2 bc and influence early manuscripts / verbal recitations, or perhaps arrive around 50AD and write the official Bible, or influence those who wrote it.
IMHO there’s a lot of cruft in there which doesn’t serve virality very well; there’s a huge effect where people pay attention to the parts they like. So, it might be much easier to insert additional messages, rather than edit existing messages. (Although there’s some risk you insert a message so unpopular that it makes the Bible less popular, of course.)
The bible has also been heavily pruned and edited at times, so it might not be so easy to inject things...
For that reason, the Koran seems like a better target for this sort of project. It has been faithfully transmitted from the beginning (to the point of including spelling errors, if I’ve heard correctly).
But I also like the idea of editing Euclid’s Elements. I believe it is the most reproduced book after the bible. Adding an extra part to Euclid’s Elements which discusses axiomatic probability theory and utility theory could be a start (although it’s not clear what the impact of that alone would be).
Probability+utility theory might be recognized as important on its own, so there might not be a big difference between including it in Elements and publishing it as its own volume.
I like the idea of editing the Koran. It spread through conquest earlier in its life than the Bible, so perhaps it’s text isn’t as vital to its success as the Bible’s which had to spread organically more before it was spread by force.
There’s also the issue of great filters: if the great filter is in our recent past, then anything we change would be net negative, and we would be better off not going back far at all.