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bentarm comments on Project Ideas for the London Hackday - Less Wrong Discussion
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Might be a silly question, but why is a bot doing this better than just creating a new account and someone manually cutting and pasting the posts: surely that would only take a few minutes work per article at most?
Nothing more than saving us the manual work, and perhaps offering a little more continuity since humans (especially me) are not particularly consistent about routine tasks. The alternative is indeed to do it like the rationality quotes threads, make it a community effort. But why make people do a computer's work if they don't have to?
Time to crunch some numbers: ~250 sequences posts at 5 minutes each makes 20 hours of work in reposting the sequences manually.
Since you reckon this could be done by two people in a day, I guess that's less than 20 hours' work: added to the fact that writing the bot is almost certainly more fun than copy-pasting the sequence, it looks like the bot gets my vote.
Just to pick a nit, I am under the impression that there are much more than 250 posts in the sequences given that Eliezer posted daily for about two years. (Of course we could stop speculating and count, but I can't be bothered) That would move the estimation much more in favour of a bot, but if its only feature is to save 40-50 hours, maybe there is something else we could do that simply isn't doable by humanpower.
Not only that, but 20 hours in one stretch is much easier than 20 hours stretched over however many months... making sure of a consistency that invariant with mood, sleeping-in and natural disasters... bots are much better at the latter.