I've had a vague idea for a project for about a year and a half that is related to the information distillation issue. Thought I'd loft it and see if anyone has thoughts.jacob wrote: ↑Sun May 07, 2023 10:13 amI have noticed how it's getting harder and harder to search the ERE forums using the google trick.
I don't know what the solution to the problem is. Knowledge is both a process of people teaching others and a result of distilling information. Both require [a lot of] effort. Ditto translating between the two. There are currently 259,000 posts on the forum that are mostly in the forum of a process. Translating that into a result in the form of lessons learned is a big job. Ditto is taking such as "results learned" and using it to propagate the learning process on the forum.
The Project at its simplest is:
1. Trawl the forum, find the best stuff, and collect it. (aka @mathiverse's best of the forum cranked to 11).
2. Organize, edit, and editorialize. Stitch into cohesive frameworks tbd.
3. Format in such a way to be internet readable as well as printable.
One way it could go is to produce multiple volumes, so The Project can be broken into reasonable chunks. BOTEREF (best of the ere forum) v1, v2, etc. Each volume could be themed: The Early Days, semiERE, WLs, emergent renaissance extreme, etc.
Multiple people could contribute pieces (aka pick a topic/subtheme/thread to read, collect, write up, format), and someone(s) could take on task of editing on a volume by volume basis as stoke dictates.
This might be a way to approach distillation in bite size chunks, as opposed to attempting a Principia EREtica, and preserve some of the insane amount of knowledge/wisdom/experience on this forum.