If one does not speak much English at all,
then one should probably play in a different sandbox.
I would not discuss philosophy in Chinese, because I do not know the language. If there was a sufficiently awesome website in Chinese, then perhaps I could be inspired to learn the language. Perhaps I could return, and participate later.
Less Wrong has lower tolerance for sloppy thinking and sloppy writing than most other playgrounds on the Internet. This is great for at least two reasons. A high bar for entry helps weed out trolls. A high bar for entry gives one an incentive to improve.
The allergy to sloppiness likely harkens back to the unique and interesting moderation policy of Eliezer Yudkowsky's SL4.org, and its mailing list. Compared to SL4, Less Wrong is a welcoming and friendly place.
Because SL4 is liable to die quite soon, because many readers will not be familiar with it, and because the moderation policy includes some good writing advice, I find it pertinent to quote an excerpt here:
Our high standards:
It is the explicit policy of this list not to rehash the basics. SL4 is for advanced topics in futurism and technology. If we've discussed it once before, or if it's something we think posters should already know, you may be courteously referred to the archives, or to another list.
Check your spelling. Check your grammar. Check your punctuation and capitalization. Use apostrophes and commas. Don't quote entire messages in your reply. Don't use HTML. Don't post one-line replies. (If it's not worth a well-written paragraph, is it really worth posting?) Don't send attachments to the list. Around 200 people read this (as of September '02), so if it takes you one minute to save each reader two seconds, you've saved well over six minutes total.
Lurk for a week or read a few archived messages before you begin posting.
This is a science-literate mailing list. If you're still unclear about whether humans evolved or were planted on Earth by flying saucers, you're welcome to read SL4, but you probably won't like what you read, and your first post will probably be your last. There could be an exception to this rule. We just haven't encountered it yet.
Sniper-based moderation
"I had assumed that the function of a moderator was more akin to a sheepdog herding the outlying members than a sniper picking off the fringe." -- Mike Deering inadvertantly sums up SL4's exact philosophy of moderation.
English is not my mother tongue. As a non-native English user, I feel that my English mastery is good enough for most everywhere on the Internet other than Less Wrong.
It is frustrating to be called out on silly mistakes you would never make in your native language. Seize the opportunity to level up in English, be hard on yourself, use reference tools, and your fluency will slowly increase. Near-fluency will give way to fluency, you will be better off from the effort.
SUGGESTION: For speakers of foreign tongues who want to improve, maybe add an "editorial input solicited" - tag. As a signal that you welcome the picking of nits and other improvements. A "Crocker's Rules" of wordcraft? If there was one I would happily apply it to this reply.
"Editorial input solicited" is perhaps not a super catchy term. Better suggestions are welcome.
I really don't like this idea, from personal experience. I thought: given my snail's pace in learning English, since I learned it at school and already know it at such a level that there is no pleasant feeling of novelty, then at the current pace I will finish in 5 years, plus any costs ... Ok, I'll be back in ten years, when I will have a decent level of English. Although learning German is much more interesting, and in any case I will learn English for a very long time, and knowledge of languages speeds up the learning of new ones, especially since ...
Hello Less Wrongers.
I'm still relatively new to the LW community, but I would like to share with you a few comments and ideas for making LW a better place for non-native English speakers.
There are two classes of people among non-native English speakers (of course, those boundaries are fuzzy) :
The problems are of course different between 1. and 2., but yet I can see ways to improve things to both categories.
Moderately fluent English speakers
Being a member of 1., here are my feelings after a few months of lurking and then trying to participate a bit in LW, from my own French pov :
I don't have any magical solution from 1., except for anyone to try to be more careful when stating things which are culture-dependant, but it's part of the most general problem of excepting short inferential distances.
For 2., I'm wondering if it would be possible to have some LW to volunteer to review articles done by non-native English speakers, and improve the English quality, before the article is published to LW in general. Do you think the idea is good overall ? Would any of you volunteer to do that ? If so, it would be nice to include a paragraph about it, or at least a link to a page explaining the modality (how to submit an article to that team, ...), on the Welcome to Less Wrong page.
Non-English speakers
I don't think non-English speakers (or people with only basic English skills) can reasonably participate on LW itself, of course. But there are ways to still be able to offer them ways to become stronger, I'm thinking about translation.
Right now I'm helping Adrien with the French translation of HP:MoR. There are also attempts to translate some parts of the Sequences into other languages. In the mirror way of the "having native English speaker to help correct the English of non-native", us the non-native can help by participating to the various translation efforts. But that give raise to several questions :
Any opinion on those suggestions ? Any volunteer for joining some of the teams ? Anyone from "the staff" who could answer about the legal issues, and about the opportunity of including those pointers in the "Welcome to Less Wrong" page ?