Karma awards for proofreaders of the Less Wrong Sequences ebook

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Dec 12, 2013

MIRI is gathering a bunch of Eliezer’s writings into a nicely-edited ebook, currently titled The Hard Part is Actually Changing Your Mind. This book will ultimately be released in various digital formats (Kindle MOBI, EPUB, and PDF). Much of the initial work for this project is complete. What we need now are volunteers to review the book's chapters to:

verify that all the content has been correctly transferred (text, equations, and images),
proofread for any typographical errors (spelling, punctuation, layout, etc.),
verify all internal and external links,
and more.

This project has been added to Youtopia, MIRI’s volunteer system. (Click “Register as a Volunteer” here to sign up. Already signed up? Go here.)

LW Karma Bonus

For this special project, every point earned in Youtopia will also earn you 3 karma on LW!

Points are awarded based on the amount of time spent proofreading the book. For example, an hour of work logged in Youtopia earns you 10 points, which will also get you 30 LW karma. Karma is awarded by admins in a publicly-accountable way: all manual karma additions are listed here.

Questions about this project can be directed to [email protected] or in the comments.

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14 points

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Points are awarded based on the amount of time spent proofreading the book.

What, no bug bounty?

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8 points

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Just wanted to say: Whoever updated the texts from the original web version to the version used in the book, they did a very good job. So far I have compared only one chapter, but I am impressed. The changes are typically rephrasing a part of a sentence, or reordering some paragraphs, but the new version feels better. I am happy to have a more polished version of the Sequences, in addition to just another format.

(I am not proofreading. I translated some of the original articles to Slovak, and now I am updating my translations using the version from the book, with the goal of making a translation of the whole book one day. This is why I automatically noticed the differences between the original and the new versions.)

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polymathwannabe

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Proofreading is my calling and my reason to live. Count me in.

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The book is not a blog; it is not published step by step, but as a whole, at the same time.

Therefore, I suggest removing comments like "Continued in next post" or "Followup to"; especially if it is a reference to the very next or very previous chapter, but also if it is two chapters behind. Specifically, chapters 3 and 4, 11 and 13, 20 and 22, 22 and 23, 28 and 29, 31 and 32, 31+32 and 34, 41 and 42, 49 and 50, 54 and 55, 56 and 57, 57 and 58, 59 and 60, 60 and 61, 62 and 63, 63 and 64, 64 and 65, 64 and 66... okay, I guess you get the idea. In a book, the next chapter being a followup to the previous chapter is pretty much expected.

On the other hand, chapters 16, 18, 28... are followups to chapters not included in the book. Maybe instead of "followup" it would be better to use some other words to express that this chapter is related to some online article.

Summary: the book is a different medium, so I suggest rewriting the standard "followup" notice, depending on situation:

it it's a followup to the previous chapter (maybe also two chapter behind), just remove it;
if it's a followup more chapters behind, use the full sentence to explain it;
if it's a followup to something not included in the book, again use the full sentence, but a different one.

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When is this expected to be released?

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I really don't know. The release date now depends almost entirely on how much volunteer effort gets put in.

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I think this might be another way the karma system continues to be a feature of a map that doesn't necessarily represent the territory.

High karma seems to me to be about being on board with LW orthodoxy, articulating that clearly in posts and comments and supporting the aims of the group.

I guess there is nothing wrong with that...though that is exactly how "karma points" are handed out in the church.

This is basically saying, "People will listen to your opinion X amount more inside LW for doing this volunteer work." It is the exact same way in the church for those who evangelize a lot or display some other evidence of their commitment to the group.

The problem, I think, is that proofreading e-books or evangelizing the group's message is not the slightest bit related to having a view that is in line with reality which is, as I understood it, one of the main aims of rationality.

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High karma seems to me to be about being on board with LW orthodoxy, articulating that clearly in posts and comments and supporting the aims of the group.

The criticism you proffer has been made independently several times. The usual answer is that cogent, intelligent criticism that shows familiarity with the premises and conclusions of LW "orthodoxy" (and clearly locates its criticism as a problem with either the plausibility of a premise or the validity of an argument, or both) tends to get upvoted. You just have to show you've done your homework.

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The problem is that exactly what qualifies as "homework" is determined by the in-group. And, as I said, this is exactly how it works in the church.

Nevermind that though. My point was really that karma isn't tied to who is right, it is tied to who we like or who furthers our preferential ends. This karma-for-work deal is another example of that.

If karma is a popularity system, then fine. But there seems to be a lingering sentiment it is more about rationality, and how a given comment or commenter is in line with it. That's not the case when you are giving people points to do tasks.

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If we feel that we want to keep track of instrumentally useful contributions to the community but also want karma to remain a more-or-less pure representation of the reception of a user's comments, then the obvious way to reflect that seems to be to create a metric other than karma to represent the former. This might also be a useful way of reflecting certain actions that have traditionally been rewarded by means of upvotes on comments bragging about them, like posting survey responses or donating to CFAR or MIRI. Granted, the development resources for this aren't likely to appear in the near term.

Elsewhere in these comments I've mentioned the XP metric that the Everything2 community created to fill a karma-like niche. It was after my time, but I'm told they ended up creating a "GP" metric (RPG metaphor, yes) that worked similarly to this.

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create a metric other than karma to represent the former

badges

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1 point

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My point was really that karma isn't tied to who is right, it is tied to who we like or who furthers our preferential ends.

Barring an objective method for telling what arguments are right, this is the way any human-run evaluation system (including e.g. formal peer review or university grades) has to work. You can try to eliminate the "who we like" part by trying to blind the identities of the people in question, but since one cannot assess degree-of-correctness directly, one has to rely on some other criteria, e.g. the extent to which the comment seems to take previous work into account. And those other criteria and their parameters, like what counts as "previous work", are ultimately set by an in-group consensus. (I felt that James Paul Gee had a particularly good elaboration of this.)

But I do agree that awarding karma for work distances karma from correctness even further than would be necessary. (Not sure whether it's a bad thing, though.)

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Will the ebook be offered for free?

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It will probably be available as pay-what-you-want, similar to the Facing the Intelligence Explosion ebook.

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What's the current estimated time when the project will finish?

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Hopefully by the end of the year.

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The LW Karma idea makes me uncomfortable. And I'm saying this as a user who doesn't have that much karma, and might be interested in doing this.

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If you come by my office and shine my shoes, I will upvote your posts until you get an extra 500 karma points. Doing my laundry will net you a cool thousand karma points.

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3 points

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I think I'd rather do my own laundry than upvote a thousand posts. If the average user even has a thousand posts.

I suppose that's what scripts are for, though.

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Indeed, and they aren't too hard to find and modify.

EDIT: Hi there! Since you're downvoting everything I say at this very minute, and haven't got to this post yet, could you please stop for a second when you do and say 'hi'?

EDIT2: Guess not.

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don't feed.

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Is this going to be released as a real book as well? I see only mentions of digital release in the post.

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The plan is to do both.

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Great! Thanks guys!

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TheTerribleTrivium

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I recently read the sequences at a fairly rapid pace using the ebooks versions available on my ipad and there were certainly a few common things I found intensely irritating. I definitely found some of the sequences interesting enough to read again more closely. Which of the sequences are included in the ebook?

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Basically all of them, with some modifications (e.g. a significantly reduced QM sequence), and with some reorganizing to improve flow.

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A professional editor would tell you to cut, at least, 100k. You should strongly consider some hacking and slashing.

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ThrustVectoring

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I've proofread three of the chapters. There are 340 of them in the version of the ebook that I was sent, and the whole thing runs over 2000 pages. At roughly 250 words per page, that's 500k words.

So, basically what alexvermeer said - pretty much all of them.

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Does anyone know what happened to the version that was supposed to be reviewed/edited down by a professional so it could be publishable length? There's so much good stuff there I'd love to be able to send to friend and family but 500k worth of blog posts is much harder to send someone than a nicely published 200k version.

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Which particular things did you find irritating?

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TheTerribleTrivium

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Poor handling of images, maths sections and inter-sequence links were the most notable ones I remember

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