Here are some services EAs might use more if they had easier access:
- copyediting (in-depth editing of a piece to making it clearer, etc)
- proofreading (more nitty-gritty spelling and grammar checking)
- formatting into a specific format (markdown, etc)
Larger organizations usually hire or contract with at least one copyeditor and to help make their written work clearer and more consistent. But a lot of people might want occasional copyediting and not find it worthwhile to go through the hassle of finding someone to do it. Particularly if they want someone with enough knowledge of EA that they can help improve and clarify EA-specific material.
A colleague writes, "I've had ~10 people ask me in the last year about finding copyeditor services, and have recommended them to many more people. Would be great to have a bank of available people who authors could hire."
I would be excited if someone started a project coordinating this! Similar to what Pineapple Operations is doing with personal and executive assistants.
Thanks for this post!
Here's a related thing I wrote recently, with a slightly different framing and some additional details, in case this is useful to someone. Though Habryka's comment makes me think perhaps LessWrong already have this mostly covered, so I guess a first step would be to check that out.
"Mesa-project* idea: Centralised & scalable proofreading, copyediting, and formatting assistance for EA-aligned people
Maybe someone should find decent/good copyeditors/proofreaders/formatters and advertise their services to EA community members who are willing & able to pay, either for their Forum posts or for other things they're working on? (By "formatters", I personally just have in mind people who can take a Google Doc with lots of tables and footnotes and format it for the EA Forum, but maybe there'd be other use cases as well, such as LaTeX.)
Ofc people can also sort this out themselves, but then there's the search and vetting and set-up costs. Seems more efficient for some actor to set it up in a centralised/scalable way. E.g., Rethink Priorities has a person to do this for our work, and that seems much better than us each finding a person ourselves. I'd like various other orgs and individuals to also have this.
Potential benefits:
(But maybe a Fermi estimate would suggest that the benefits are actually really small and not worth thinking about? Seems worth at least checking, though?)
Potential downsides:
*Not quite a megaproject, but more than a microproject :D"
I'm willing to do this work for $15-35 per page (depending on the author's ability to pay); I'm very detail-oriented and like this kind of stuff. I can only really copyedit/proofread posts written in American English, but I can do formatting for any text. I could probably do one or two copyediting or formatting jobs per weekend.