How much would it cost to set up parallel Less Wrong sites for the top five languages, relying entirely on Google Translate to start with, perhaps providing only the Sequences at first, and improving the translations gradually through wiki editing?
It would definitely take a lot of time and effort. To quote Rational Wiki:
If you indicate your disagreement with the local belief clusters without at least using their jargon, it used to be common for someone to helpfully suggest that “you should try reading the sequences” before attempting to talk to them. The “sequences”[6] are several collated series of Yudkowsky’s blog posts, and there are eighteen sequences in all. The indexes for just the four “core sequences”[7] are somewhere north of 10,000 words. Those link to over a hundred and fifty 2,000-3,000-word blog posts. That’s about 300,000-450,000 words for those four, and around a million words for the lot.[8] With a few million more words of often-relevant comments. For comparison, the Lord Of The Rings trilogy is 473,000 words.[9] As such, “You should try reading the sequences” is LessWrong for “fuck you.” This seems to have stopped since it was called to their attention.
Lets not forget that the sequences are set up specifically to appeal to a western audience with presumably western ideals. Major alterations would probably need to be made to compensate for the dissonance between cultures. The typical mind fallacy strikes among people with fairly similar upbringing. How much more destructive would it be in the transfer of ideas between a person whose heritage diverged from that of another man 3,000 years ago?
yes, but bias twists the way different people interpret a message. A Buddhist would be unlikely to counter and argument against religion the way a Christian would. Less Wrong is designed to free people of bias in its Western form. The sequences counter memes that are widespread in America but might not be so in Egypt. Im not saying that the ideas cant be spread, i just think you might have to do more than just translating the language if you’re going to appeal to an entirely different audience with different ways of thinking.
How much would it cost to set up parallel Less Wrong sites for the top five languages, relying entirely on Google Translate to start with, perhaps providing only the Sequences at first, and improving the translations gradually through wiki editing?
It would definitely take a lot of time and effort. To quote Rational Wiki:
Lets not forget that the sequences are set up specifically to appeal to a western audience with presumably western ideals. Major alterations would probably need to be made to compensate for the dissonance between cultures. The typical mind fallacy strikes among people with fairly similar upbringing. How much more destructive would it be in the transfer of ideas between a person whose heritage diverged from that of another man 3,000 years ago?
I think you overestimate the diiferences between humans. Here are the human universals. Some of which we need to get rid of, chiefly superstition.
yes, but bias twists the way different people interpret a message. A Buddhist would be unlikely to counter and argument against religion the way a Christian would. Less Wrong is designed to free people of bias in its Western form. The sequences counter memes that are widespread in America but might not be so in Egypt. Im not saying that the ideas cant be spread, i just think you might have to do more than just translating the language if you’re going to appeal to an entirely different audience with different ways of thinking.