Here’s a related thing I wrote recently, with a slightly different framing and some additional details, in case this is useful to someone. Though Habryka’s comment makes me think perhaps LessWrong already have this mostly covered, so I guess a first step would be to check that out.
“Mesa-project* idea: Centralised & scalable proofreading, copyediting, and formatting assistance for EA-aligned people
Maybe someone should find decent/good copyeditors/proofreaders/formatters and advertise their services to EA community members who are willing & able to pay, either for their Forum posts or for other things they’re working on? (By “formatters”, I personally just have in mind people who can take a Google Doc with lots of tables and footnotes and format it for the EA Forum, but maybe there’d be other use cases as well, such as LaTeX.)
Ofc people can also sort this out themselves, but then there’s the search and vetting and set-up costs. Seems more efficient for some actor to set it up in a centralised/scalable way. E.g., Rethink Priorities has a person to do this for our work, and that seems much better than us each finding a person ourselves. I’d like various other orgs and individuals to also have this.
Potential benefits:
Save authors a small/moderate amount of time
Save other community members a small/moderate amount of time helping with copyediting, proofreading, etc.
Somewhat/notably improve the clarity of posts
Somewhat/notably increase how many things are posted, if there are some people feeling blocked by time constraints or by worries about clarity or whatever
(But maybe a Fermi estimate would suggest that the benefits are actually really small and not worth thinking about? Seems worth at least checking, though?)
Potential downsides:
Takes some attention and time from whoever sets it up
Costs a little money
Maybe gives the vibe that things should only be posted if they meet a certain writing quality standard? Probably not though?”
*Not quite a megaproject, but more than a microproject :D”
I’m willing to do this work for $15-35 per page (depending on the author’s ability to pay); I’m very detail-oriented and like this kind of stuff. I can only really copyedit/proofread posts written in American English, but I can do formatting for any text. I could probably do one or two copyediting or formatting jobs per weekend.
Thanks for this post!
Here’s a related thing I wrote recently, with a slightly different framing and some additional details, in case this is useful to someone. Though Habryka’s comment makes me think perhaps LessWrong already have this mostly covered, so I guess a first step would be to check that out.
“Mesa-project* idea: Centralised & scalable proofreading, copyediting, and formatting assistance for EA-aligned people
Maybe someone should find decent/good copyeditors/proofreaders/formatters and advertise their services to EA community members who are willing & able to pay, either for their Forum posts or for other things they’re working on? (By “formatters”, I personally just have in mind people who can take a Google Doc with lots of tables and footnotes and format it for the EA Forum, but maybe there’d be other use cases as well, such as LaTeX.)
Ofc people can also sort this out themselves, but then there’s the search and vetting and set-up costs. Seems more efficient for some actor to set it up in a centralised/scalable way. E.g., Rethink Priorities has a person to do this for our work, and that seems much better than us each finding a person ourselves. I’d like various other orgs and individuals to also have this.
Potential benefits:
Save authors a small/moderate amount of time
Save other community members a small/moderate amount of time helping with copyediting, proofreading, etc.
Somewhat/notably improve the clarity of posts
Somewhat/notably increase how many things are posted, if there are some people feeling blocked by time constraints or by worries about clarity or whatever
(But maybe a Fermi estimate would suggest that the benefits are actually really small and not worth thinking about? Seems worth at least checking, though?)
Potential downsides:
Takes some attention and time from whoever sets it up
Costs a little money
Maybe gives the vibe that things should only be posted if they meet a certain writing quality standard? Probably not though?”
*Not quite a megaproject, but more than a microproject :D”
I’m willing to do this work for $15-35 per page (depending on the author’s ability to pay); I’m very detail-oriented and like this kind of stuff. I can only really copyedit/proofread posts written in American English, but I can do formatting for any text. I could probably do one or two copyediting or formatting jobs per weekend.