I think one of the major things you learn as you get older is that there is a huge abundance of people who say the right thing, and a much smaller group of people who do the right thing.

The internet made this even worse by celebrating people who only have to say the right thing.

    > The example book of Old books of agriculture is probably not that important today

We're about to enter an era of climate instability that's going to cause wild fluctuations in the ability to grow food across the globe. Historical agriculture data AND data about confounds is crucial for figuring out what strains outside of our current mostly mono-strain agricultural supply chain could be cultivated.

And that's just one use case out of thousands; what if you want to understand and reconstruct technology adoption from that era?

What if... you just want to learn what your ancestor was doing at such and such time?

What if you want to find clever techniques for robot arms to work with food crops in space?

Or, heck just the alpha from a hedge fund point of view of finding old climate patterns and... :)

Your ability to make the most of knowledge is only limited by your imagination.

    > Liberians have to accept that much of their job is sending books to be burned. A lot of them try their best to get people to be interested in older books, but they have to make way for "newer" books instead.

    > The article is written in the same way as how dogs are getting murdered in the dog shelter, even if "everyone" agrees it is wrong, yet nobody adopts them.

re: saving books, at a personal level, I try to use the excuse of work to find, read, and do stuff with old books,

https://1517.substack.com/p/powder-and-stone-or-why-medieval

And yes, people still care. And people who care do things.

Well if you're appealing to librarians:

"Hey, guys, when the librarians get pissed about the destruction of books, it’s time to put those listening ears on.

Because we are very comfortable with the idea that books are tools that can be retired. What’s happening right now is not that...."

https://bsky.app/profile/annabookwriter.bsky.social/post/3mt...

Also, why are people acting like Anthropic digitizing and destroying a rare book is what makes it inaccessible to the public?

If they were simply buying the books and doing nothing with them, the public wouldn’t be able to access their copies anyway.

They should be happy to have a job at all in the Republic of Liberia.

A quick search suggests that most "weeded" books are sold on or donated rather than burnt or sent to landfill. Do you have sources that say otherwise?