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Comment by Mudbugs | Hacker News Reader

Yep, this feels pretty much it. Looking at the "rare books", it was books that nobody would care about or would just rot away anyway. (The example book of Old books of agriculture is probably not that important today)

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.

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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.

This would be more convincing if there was any agreement on what the right thing supposedly is.

The major lesson I myself learned as I got older is that “you should do the right thing” is a rephrasing of “you should do what I want you to do”.

> This would be more convincing if there was any agreement on what the right thing supposedly is.

The internet has amplified voices who say things to signal rather than do things to change.

That's orthogonal to knowing what "the right thing" is.

The increase in people who believe that perception is reality has the logical consequences of people shouting their opinions loudly enough so that it becomes 'the right thing'

That’s just not true. There is a clearly a right thing to do in many circumstances.

Knowing and enacting are two distinct things, "you should do what I want you to do" means you're already doing the wrong thing, and yes, there is an agreement on what the right thing is, its what is ethical, that is, what non profits and archivists are forced to do.

I can’t believe that in the multipolar world of 2026, where hundreds of conflicting world views coexist, where universalism is being disproven on a daily basis, it’s still possible to read things like “there is agreement on what the right thing is”.

This is as blatantly false as claiming that the Earth is flat, and the fact that there is no such agreement (descriptive moral relativism) has been firmly established in philosophy for well over a century.

If you think ethical arguments like "murder is bad" or "human knowledge should be preserved" and a demonstrable falsity like "the earth is flat" are equivalent arguments then you are so far gone you might as well be a flat earther.

Blind futurists and AI cheerleaders scare me on how cavalier and how many crimes against humanity they ignore.

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

If I may be flippant, not to you but to the sentiment, skill issue.

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.

I don't understand what you're trying to say here.

    > 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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-kill_shelter

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.

"No-kill shelters" are very rare and very controversial (thanks to PETA); most still have to kill by law (overpopulation), and they instead tend to focus on not taking in more than they can handle. They are very controversial because they are more of a "moral" than a "practical" solution to animal overpopulation. They try their best to let animals have their "normal natural life to the end". They are just more focused on the animals' well-being, kind of like a library for books, but they still have to kill if they overpopulate.

The main article is written like it is the "end of the world", just like your random rambling about "climate instability" is just the natural course Earth has been on for its existence, with melting ice.

Random article about powder and stone, completely irrelevant.

The old book mentioned was just a farmer's book; you can find all this history in the area's historical records.

"Skill issue." How old are you? I think it would help you more if you contacted a shelter and talked about what they really do.

Better sources than Wikipedia that explain what they do; it is, of course, different from shelter to shelter, but euthanising due to overpopulation is still part of it. (Like too many books in a library, they need to make room for other books that people want, if it just end up roting on the shelf and nobody loans it over years, either destruction or storage, most don't have space for storage)

https://bestfriends.org/stories/best-friends-magazine/debate...

https://lifelineanimal.org/the-no-kill-controversy/

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.

Because destroying the book makes it possibly inaccessible permanently because we have no idea how long anthropic plans on storing the digital copy, if at all. A lot of people assume they would for future training, but you don't know that.

If they at least didn't destroy the book, someone could purchase it when anthropic eventually goes belly up. Hopefully someone will at least be able to purchase their digital scan and hopefully the scan is of decent quality and clearly indicates the provenance of the text.

> we have no idea how long anthropic plans on storing the digital copy, if at all. A lot of people assume they would for future training, but you don't know that.

Books are considered super high quality training data. Anthropic has no reason to get rid of this data that 1. They’ve spent a ton of money on and 2. Will remain useful indefinitely for training LLMs.

> If they at least didn't destroy the book, someone could purchase it when anthropic eventually goes belly up.

The same applies for a digital scan? The information isn’t any more likely to be lost.

Yesterday you could have purchased one of these books and read it. Good luck doing so today.

I don't know why you're so quick to assume this will all just "work out" such that the scans are ultimately accessible. Arguably the most likely scenarios are either Anthropic survives and holds them away in perpetuity or Anthropic fails and they are sold off to the highest bidder who does the same.

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...

I don't get the point of this one. We not talking about "retiring books", we talking about "rare but still fine books".

I don't think many Liberians like the idea that they have to do it; it is just one of those things that has to be done, sadly.

I don't think that changes the message at all. If a librarian doesn't like routine book destruction, they would still feel worse about this different thing that is happening.

I don't know what Liberia has to do with it.

Weeding (deselection works) is a fundamental part of collections management. Every trained librarian is going to understand this.

The interlibrary loan system has mechanisms in place to make sure the member libraries keep two copies of each work in each region. Collection managers consult these databases during weeding to make sure they don't deaccession the last copy.

If the monograph was never collected by a library and it gets caught up in a destructive scanning project then I guess it was pretty "rare" in a literal sense. "Rare Book" in library land is sort of a term of art and I'm not sure if the books in these destructive scanning projects meet the criteria.

I'm not a bsky person so I didn't click though but library books aren't "retired" to a farm upstate. My SO works at a library, they are mostly shredded. This is a nothingburger

I made sure the thread was public before I posted it here. It ends "Fuck, I have destroyed MY OWN books. I’m not overly precious here.

What Amazon is doing is vile."

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?

Just go to a local library and ask a librarian or anyone who has a lot of books and tries to give them away; sadly, in most cases, they pick the valuable ones, and the rest just get sent for destruction (Burning).

It is pretty standard procedure.

The difference everyone is missing, is that now there is commercial incentive to burn books aka destroy them after scanning. It's now a profitable business to do so, not something that only has to be done to clear up space

Ours has a volunteer run used bookstore that sells a few for pennies on the dollar. Vast majority are shredded

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