Does your offer include entire books?

I'll be making a visit to the Library of Congress sometime in the next month. I visit the Library of Congress a few times each year to scan things which basically can't be found elsewhere. If there's anything in particular you want from the Library of Congress next time I go, let me know here. I'd strongly prefer that you've tried other resources first, and checked that what you want is in the Library of Congress catalog (or likely so; sometimes you can't tell).

I might also visit the NIST library and National Agricultural Library.

Also, if there's anything who is going to make a visit to the British Library or any major library in Russia (e.g., the Russian State Library, the National Library of Russia, Library of the Russian Academy of Sciences, any major academic library), let me know if you'd be willing to take some scan requests.

I hope that's the explanation and a little pushback will motivate them into scanning it.

Edit: On a related note, I find following discussions on Tumblr to be a huge pain, and hope either this improves in the future or that more discussions happen elsewhere.

Tumblr is downright unusable if you want to read a discussion. Unless you are a direct participant, they are nearly impossible to follow, and for direct participants it is only possible because they know what they are replying to. It is obviously intended for those who like to share stuff and not those who like to read. Improving it would require creating a completely different service based on completely different ideas about how to structure discussion.

Ouch. That is weird. Perhaps there's something historical going on where they used to let Harvard students keep their own copyright but a few decades ago changed it to demand copyright, which is why they can't scan the entirety of an old thesis like Todd's. Hm. You could try replying and asking why they can't scan a Harvard thesis given your personal experience.

If that doesn't work and the other guy can't help, I wonder what I could do. Leaving that thesis out is a really big gap in the literature... Going to Harvard physically with a scanner is not an option since I don't know if they would even lend it out of the stacks to me, much less when I'll ever be in Boston again. In an instance of rather bad timing on my part, it turns out Todd died just last year so I can't simply email him and ask him to release it under CC-BY-SA or something and then the Harvard people could be told they have copyright clearance; his wife Joyce is still around, though, so I could try asking her to license the thesis.

Perhaps you could ask the scanners what they would accept as adequate proof of copyright safety, such as some sort of document signed by Joyce? (No point in bothering her if it wouldn't get them to unlock the thesis, after all.)

You bring up a number of important points. Perhaps I missed this when reading, but one role LessWrong plays and continues to play is a good source of discussion. Often I'll find the discussion to be more interesting than a particular article. It's not uncommon for me to be linked to a particular comment divorced from its larger context and not be interested in the larger context. I don't know how common this behavior is, but this is not uncommon for me, and I don't think replacing the rationalist materials with a wiki or Q&A site would suit this well at all. This is one reason to favor something like Reddit.

I'm also generally not a fan of shutting down even semi-active forums. In one online community I've participated in, there were several major forum closures, and each time there was a period of confusion about what to do if you're interested in discussion, along with basically sectarian posturing to get active posters. The sectarian stuff caused major problems down the line, and the current discussion forum for this community more or less voluntarily avoids those conflicts now. There also are a number of roles LessWrong plays that I'm not sure would survive a transition to the diaspora, like the page about sharing academic papers. I also often enjoy reading the open threads. Perhaps transitioning LessWrong more towards discussion would be a good middle ground.

Edit: On a related note, I find following discussions on Tumblr to be a huge pain, and hope either this improves in the future or that more discussions happen elsewhere.

• Utts, J. (1988). "Successful replication versus statistical significance". Journal of Parapsychology, 52(4): 305-320 (/r/scholar couldn't provide it.)

Well, there is the issue of revealed preferences...

I might believe they are mistaken

Do you believe they are mistaken instrumentally (it's not a good use of their time for their goals) or they are mistaken about what goals to pursue?

Do you think it's just your personal opinion or something more than that?

In other words, people have preferences (e.g. white wine vs red wine) with which you could disagree, but about which you can't say that they are "right" or "wrong". All you can say is that your preferences are similar or different.

Some people, of course, add "and those with preferences unlike mine are moral degenerates who will be the first against the wall when the revolution comes", but those tend to be not very reasonable people.

So, do you think the attiudes to leisure and how to spend it are mere preferences which can be tut-tutted but tolerated -- or are they a blight upon humanity which needs to be fixed?