All of Letian Wang's Comments + Replies

Another generally good approach: Avoid big words if you can. Uncommon words are much harder for non native speakers to comprehend even if we know the word. Often I found myself searching in my memory for the word's meaning and missed a whole sentence. It's difficult to do if these words permeate the materials you engage with，but not impossible. Also，don't use the word permeate!

Hi Ben,

As a Chinese national currently living in the west, I think I broadly agree with your argument that "efforts to expand effective altruism into other languages should initially focus on person-to-person outreach to a small number of people with key expertise." I also appreciate your grasp of the complexity of cultural and linguistic barriers in promoting EA ideas in the Chinese context, which can often be lost on EAs who are less familiar with other cultures.

One potential objection to this is that not rushing into massive translation effort... (read more)