Cthulhoo comments on Less Wrong and non-native English speakers - Less Wrong

28 Post author: kilobug 06 November 2011 01:37PM

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Comment author: Cthulhoo 07 November 2011 09:28:25AM 5 points [-]

In my introductory post a few weeks ago I briefly mentioned a similar issue, so I basically second kilobug remarks. By the way, as soon as my job stops devouring all of my time, I would like to help translating part of the sequences in Italian.

More importantly, anyone remotely rational will probably have already prioritized learning English.

I want to reply to this point, and I'm interested to read the opinion of the community on the subject. In my opinion, part of your duty as a rationalist is to spread you knowledge to a wider audience. This is what I do, anyways, trying to popularize LW ideas among my friends. Needless to say, many of them haven't ever heard before about biases and Bayes theorem, and a fair number doesn't have a degree or can read English well enough. So, when I manage to raise some interest in one of the site's topics, I would like to be able to redirect them to some of the material of the site, but, unfortunately, I can't. I'm not saying that they would all have become perfet rationalists if they could read the Sequences, but even small improvements aren't to be discarded, in my opinion. To summarize, while the quote from ArisKatsaris is basically true, I think that we should also think to the potential positive effect for a wider, difference audience.