Can you provide an example of the scenario you describe, or something like it? I agree that journalists can cause harm with irresponsible stories, but I’m less sure of the entire “anti-community” aspect. It could depend on what you mean by “anti-community”, though.
btrettel
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“Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater” is good advice.
There’s no reason to shut down the entire forum if the problems can be solved with less collateral damage.
Having participated in online communities which would somewhat regularly get made fun of by others, I’m not sure I agree that others making fun of an online community tarnishes its reputation in the general population. Seems to me that most people aren’t aware of the people making fun of the community. I think dishonest representations with wider distribution are much more harmful, e.g., RationalWiki’s take on LessWrong. And we should do something about that, but again, I don’t think shutting down the forum is the right approach.
Also, I tend to ignore farewell posts like that. In my experience, they happen regardless of the “health” of the community. I can think of one online community I’ve participated in that regularly has such threads, despite activity being at an all time high. They can describe real problems which should be fixed, but often don’t.
Yes, with some caveats:
you agree to only use the copy for non-commercial purposes;
you will not distribute the copy;
if there’s no other good way to obtain the book (e.g., if you can buy the book or get it via interlibrary loan, go do that), or the book is in the public domain;
there’s not a particular section you are interested in (if there is, let me know);
the book is not too long.
With the above caveats, this should be at worst fair use, but I am an engineer, not a lawyer. (I am, however, finishing up a class on US intellectual property law, which clarified much of my understanding of the law in this regard.)
I’ll limit myself to 2 requests for entire books (first come, first served), as the scanner they have is not ideal for scanning entire books. They have a good overhead scanner, but it’s somewhat slow.
I’ll be making a visit to the Library of Congress sometime in the next month. I visit the Library of Congress a few times each year to scan things which basically can’t be found elsewhere. If there’s anything in particular you want from the Library of Congress next time I go, let me know here. I’d strongly prefer that you’ve tried other resources first, and checked that what you want is in the Library of Congress catalog (or likely so; sometimes you can’t tell).
I might also visit the NIST library and National Agricultural Library.
Also, if there’s anything who is going to make a visit to the British Library or any major library in Russia (e.g., the Russian State Library, the National Library of Russia, Library of the Russian Academy of Sciences, any major academic library), let me know if you’d be willing to take some scan requests.
It’s worth asking if they’ll scan it again, but I’m fairly confident they would continue to refuse to scan it even if there were no copyright issues. My recommendation might be asking someone else to scan the entire dissertation on their own. The catalog record indicates the dissertation has 61 pages, which is totally doable.
Incidentally, HathiTrust has it, but it’s not available for download. In addition to Harvard, Cornell has a copy as well. Might be worth asking someone at Cornell if Harvard is a dead end.
Agreed. Tumblr seems to be bad for discussion by design.
In my experience, the actual reason is probably not copyright, as was suggested. The ILL software likely has a few canned responses, and “this is too big, we don’t want to scan it” likely rounds to the reason received. I’ve also had a librarian refuse to scan a relatively short document for “copyright” reasons, despite the document being in the public domain, though not obviously so.
You bring up a number of important points. Perhaps I missed this when reading, but one role LessWrong plays and continues to play is a good source of discussion. Often I’ll find the discussion to be more interesting than a particular article. It’s not uncommon for me to be linked to a particular comment divorced from its larger context and not be interested in the larger context. I don’t know how common this behavior is, but this is not uncommon for me, and I don’t think replacing the rationalist materials with a wiki or Q&A site would suit this well at all. This is one reason to favor something like Reddit.
I’m also generally not a fan of shutting down even semi-active forums. In one online community I’ve participated in, there were several major forum closures, and each time there was a period of confusion about what to do if you’re interested in discussion, along with basically sectarian posturing to get active posters. The sectarian stuff caused major problems down the line, and the current discussion forum for this community more or less voluntarily avoids those conflicts now. There also are a number of roles LessWrong plays that I’m not sure would survive a transition to the diaspora, like the page about sharing academic papers. I also often enjoy reading the open threads. Perhaps transitioning LessWrong more towards discussion would be a good middle ground.
Edit: On a related note, I find following discussions on Tumblr to be a huge pain, and hope either this improves in the future or that more discussions happen elsewhere.
Do you have access to ProQuest? Seems you can download the paper there.
It’s certainly possible that they don’t actually prefer what they claim to. I don’t see any reason to argue with people about that.
The former. Whenever someone complains to me that they don’t have time to do something they (claim to) enjoy greatly (let’s call it activity X), but I know that they spend a lot of time watching TV, reading books, etc., and I’m confident that they enjoy TV, etc. less than activity X, it’s pretty easy to conclude they use their time poorly. And I don’t think I’m unjustified in that belief.
Nowhere did I say that people who use their time inefficiently are a blight. I’d really only call people who are actively being harmful a blight.
I recommend that people evaluate whether reading fiction, watching TV, or whatnot, is the best use of their time. If they think these activities are acceptable, I see no reason to argue further with them. I might believe they are mistaken, which I think is perfectly reasonable.
Are you making a general argument against any kind of leisure, then?
In a strict sense, no. But I absolutely do believe that many people spend their time poorly, by having way too much “leisure”, and by choosing inefficient leisure activities.
I tend to agree with abramdemski that switching contexts often is the barrier to productivity, not necessarily doing “leisure” activities. If you enjoy your work then there is no substantial difference between leisure and non-leisure. This is of little help to people with boring work, but you can usually change your job.
And not all leisure activities are equal. When I visit my parents, I’m amazed by how much TV and movies they watch. I don’t think they are worse than average in this regard, in fact, they probably watch less than your average American. Strangely, they seem annoyed when I don’t want to watch movies with them. I was told to “take a break”. It’s not that I chose against leisure, as many times I was doing something I consider leisure. Rather, there are many activities which completely dominate watching movies or TV to me, and I chose one of those instead. I’d say reading fiction is not much better than watching TV.
By “imagination is content-neutral”, I mean that you can imagine both fictional and non-fictional things. An inventor might imagine a new technology just like a writer could imagine a story.
I’ll also agree that “useful” is a fuzzy word. More precisely, it’s much easier to make something which advances many more goals (not necessarily just your own) by not reading fiction. Reading fiction generally would only serve to make yourself transiently happy, and maybe indirectly could make the writer happy (by paying them, or letting them know that you enjoyed the story).
Good post. I’ve argued along similar lines before.
One thing that’s worth mentioning is that reading a lot of fiction generally makes one a pretty fast reader. Or at least that’s been my impression. It could be that fast readers are more likely to enjoy fiction. While I’m sure that has some element of truth, in most things you get better with practice, so it seems likely to me that reading a lot makes one a better reader. I don’t think that reading a lot of fiction is preferable to reading a lot of textbooks in useful fields, but it’s better than many other things people could be doing. Ultimately, I don’t think this is a good reason to read a lot of fiction, but those who have read a lot of fiction in the past and now think it was a waste of time have a good reason to think that it wasn’t entirely a waste of time.
I’m not sure if you could make similar arguments for fiction in other forms of media, or other things like video games.
I disagree with this, though it could merely be semantics. Imagination is content-neutral. abramdemski is arguing that we should bias our time towards things more useful than fiction, if I understand him correctly.
My father said he read a review of a book on this subject posted on r/history on reddit. He did not read the book. He said it might have been written by a British author. Not much help, but this is what I learned.
I recall that my father read a book on this issue. I’ll ask him about it next time we talk and relay the information to you. Remind me if I do not do so.
Yes, the data is online.
I can’t help with the duration of your time in transit, but a lot of people will drive to a Metro station, park there, and then take Metro into DC. Seems to be the most convenient option to me, but I don’t own a car, so take this with a grain of salt.