I remember a bunch of nice things on SL4. Rolf Nelson posted his deterrence idea there first, Wei had several interesting exchanges with Eliezer, Justin Corwin reported on his AI-box experiments and gave a partial transcript… Wei’s output is especially hard to find these days because it’s spread thinly over everything-list, one-logic, SL4, LW, and decision-theory-workshop. Turning off posting on defunct forums is okay for me, but could you please find some way to keep the archives accessible online, so we can keep linking to individual messages like I did in this comment?
I suggest importing the SL4 archive into Google Groups, which seems likely to remain accessible for the foreseeable future. If anyone has the complete SL4 archive as a compressed Unix mailbox file (and can put it on the web and send me a URL), I’d be happy to do this. My own personal archive only goes back to 2002.
It would be great to have the Extropians list archive be available as well. It spawn off both everything-list and SL4, I think, and contained some of the earlier anthropic reasoning and Singularity discussions. I volunteer to import that into Google as well if anyone can send me a mailbox file.
For finding my non-LW posts, most (besides SL4 and Extropian posts) are archived in Google Groups. You can use the “Search author’s post” boxes on these twopages to search for my pre-2002 and post-2002 posts respectively. (If SL4 and Extropians were imported into Google Groups then those search boxes would cover them as well.)
Wei, have you considered spending some time to collect your various old emails & posts? I see some stuff listed on http://weidai.com/ but far less than I think there must be. (In part by collecting my old material, I’ve populated http://www.gwern.net/ with a fair amount of stuff, and I think you’re a much better writer & thinker than me.) Heck, just collecting all your emails on a topic and pasting them into a page would be useful.
I wanted a raw archive in Unix mailbox format so I can feed it to Google Groups. It looks like you scraped the SL4.org website, in which case I’d have to reverse the email-to-HTML process that SL4.org used, which I’d like to avoid if possible. BTW, I would ask Eliezer directly for the raw archive, but I did that a few years ago and he didn’t respond.
I know, I was responding to “Let’s provide a tarball of emails for archival purposes (the Internet Archive has up to February 2009)”. A tarball sounds like a good idea, but I was confused by the mention of the Internet Archive when the official SL4 archive is still working fine.
My point there was that sl4.org will cost $8+ a year indefinitely (for the domain name alone), and my mental target is 2070; will Eliezer pay >$600 just to keep sl4.org going? Probably not. I’d guesssl4.org will be no more by 2030 at the latest. So it’s nice to know that there’s an existing backup already even if no one ever gets around to making a tarball dump of the website.
(I’ve learned to ask for busy people to do as little as possible; if I suggested a dump be made and only then SL4′s listserv shut down, I would guarantee that the proposal go nowhere.)
I remember a bunch of nice things on SL4. Rolf Nelson posted his deterrence idea there first, Wei had several interesting exchanges with Eliezer, Justin Corwin reported on his AI-box experiments and gave a partial transcript… Wei’s output is especially hard to find these days because it’s spread thinly over everything-list, one-logic, SL4, LW, and decision-theory-workshop. Turning off posting on defunct forums is okay for me, but could you please find some way to keep the archives accessible online, so we can keep linking to individual messages like I did in this comment?
I suggest importing the SL4 archive into Google Groups, which seems likely to remain accessible for the foreseeable future. If anyone has the complete SL4 archive as a compressed Unix mailbox file (and can put it on the web and send me a URL), I’d be happy to do this. My own personal archive only goes back to 2002.
It would be great to have the Extropians list archive be available as well. It spawn off both everything-list and SL4, I think, and contained some of the earlier anthropic reasoning and Singularity discussions. I volunteer to import that into Google as well if anyone can send me a mailbox file.
For finding my non-LW posts, most (besides SL4 and Extropian posts) are archived in Google Groups. You can use the “Search author’s post” boxes on these two pages to search for my pre-2002 and post-2002 posts respectively. (If SL4 and Extropians were imported into Google Groups then those search boxes would cover them as well.)
Wei, have you considered spending some time to collect your various old emails & posts? I see some stuff listed on http://weidai.com/ but far less than I think there must be. (In part by collecting my old material, I’ve populated http://www.gwern.net/ with a fair amount of stuff, and I think you’re a much better writer & thinker than me.) Heck, just collecting all your emails on a topic and pasting them into a page would be useful.
People seem to like this idea, but nobody has sent me archives of either list (SL4 and Extropians) yet.
? I provided an SL4 archive 8 days before your comment, at Dropbox: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5317066/15-05-2011-sl4.org.tar.7z
I wanted a raw archive in Unix mailbox format so I can feed it to Google Groups. It looks like you scraped the SL4.org website, in which case I’d have to reverse the email-to-HTML process that SL4.org used, which I’d like to avoid if possible. BTW, I would ask Eliezer directly for the raw archive, but I did that a few years ago and he didn’t respond.
Pretty much free to ask again. Ping him as a reply to your original email?
And upload the data to github to make reliable private backup trivial. (This also works for active lists.)
Thanks for the links, they’ll come in handy!
From my first email:
Why not just leave the current archives on sl4.org online indefinitely? It’s stored as flat HTML and doesn’t require the list to actually be active.
I’ve never suggested otherwise. A mailing list is not a website.
I know, I was responding to “Let’s provide a tarball of emails for archival purposes (the Internet Archive has up to February 2009)”. A tarball sounds like a good idea, but I was confused by the mention of the Internet Archive when the official SL4 archive is still working fine.
My point there was that sl4.org will cost $8+ a year indefinitely (for the domain name alone), and my mental target is 2070; will Eliezer pay >$600 just to keep sl4.org going? Probably not. I’d guess sl4.org will be no more by 2030 at the latest. So it’s nice to know that there’s an existing backup already even if no one ever gets around to making a tarball dump of the website.
(I’ve learned to ask for busy people to do as little as possible; if I suggested a dump be made and only then SL4′s listserv shut down, I would guarantee that the proposal go nowhere.)
It’s hard to hyperlink to a single email in the middle of a tarball.