The Singularity Institute is in the process of publishing Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Sequences of rationality posts as an electronic book. The Sequences are made up of multiple hundreds of posts. These are being downloaded and converted to LaTeX for publishing programmatically and that’s where the human tasks begin. These will entail:
- Verifying that all the content has all been transferred, including all text, equations and images.
- Proofreading for any typographical errors that may have escaped attention thus far.
- Verifying that all external links are still alive (and replacing any that are not).
- Creating a bibliography for all material referenced in the chapters (posts).
The recent document publishing efforts at SIAI would not have been possible without the assistance of dedicated volunteers. This new project is the perfect opportunity to help out lesswrong while giving you an excuse to catch up on (or revisit) your reading of some foundational rational thinking material. As an added bonus every post reviewed will save the world with 3.5*epsilon probability.
We need volunteers who are willing to read some sequence posts and have an eye for detail. Anyone interested in contributing should contact me at cameron.taylor [at] singinst [dot] org.
For those more interested in academic papers we also have regular publications (and re-publications) that need proofreading and editing before they are released.
Glad you're doing this and sorry that I do not currently have time to proofread a batch of them myself.
This might be the only time ever that I can mention this without automatically sounding like an asshole, so here goes: Eliezer, whose writing is generally amazingly consistent and well-proofread with respect to style and punctuation, has the habit of using a hyphen, surrounded by single spaces, in place of a dash. He's far from alone in doing this, and it's an entirely reasonable habit to have given that the hyphen is an ASCII character but dashes aren't. However, it doesn't look good even on the web, and looks a lot worse in nicely typeset text. I'd strongly recommend replacing these space-enclosed hyphens with one of the two standard, correct dash usages: either an em (long) dash without spaces, or an en (short) dash enclosed in single spaces.
My apologies if this kind of advice isn't welcome or, of course, if you and your proofreading team already thought of it!
Absolutely. The " - " issue occurs in all of Eliezer's work (and to be fair most work by folks working with an ascii-like medium). We've recently prepared a manuscript for the first 17 chapters of Methods of Rationality to be sent off to be published as hard copy. In that source I performed the substitution :s/ - /---/g across the board.
I'll have to be a little more careful with some of the sequence conversion---that particular character combination also occurs in equations that we'll be manually converting to the LaTeX equation environment.