I think it would be at least polite, if you're going to link to what has every appearance of an unauthorized copy, hosted on your own website, of a copyrighted work, to give the context of the original publication. This is a chapter in this book:

http://www.amazon.com/Pedagogy-Practice-Science-Contemporary...

Good catch. Being a selected chapter in an otherwise obscure book(to me, pardon) i would have never known. It looks like the root site is littered with various articles, origin unknown, at least after a quick browse. Still, Since the title mentioned 'Involution' on a site about tech/startup growth, i am curious what the poster wanted to point out, if at all.

The system used on TrueReddit is nice: submitters are required to post a submission statement with every post, explaining in a few sentences why the post is interesting.

It seems interesting in itself, but perhaps gwern had an analogy with semiconductor progress, given yesterday's front-paging of the 5nm and 7nm goals.

Yes, that's one reason I bumped it up in my submission queue: nuclear bombs are an unusual area of engineering/science - a field which has basically perfected its craft as far a it will be permitted by the surrounding society, and is experienced that rarest of things, the endgame of a field.

You realize that's an anthology, right, not an entire book on nuclear weapons engineering? (Gusterson has written some books on the culture of the national labs, but this essay was not written as part of one of them.)

Yes, I do. I don't catch your point.

EDIT: On further reflection, maybe I do. I didn't mean to say that you took the work out of context in the sense in which we complain that a quotation may be taken out of context. This chapter is doubtlessly very loosely coupled with the others in the book and can stand on it own.

I merely meant to suggest that it would be helpful to people like me, who find this article relevant and interesting and will probably want to refer to it in the future, to know how to refer to it. We can discover the likely source from Google, as I did, but there is always the chance that what you've reprinted is a different version from what appears in the book, so it's good to have an actual citation.

The second issue is that, unless you have permission from MIT press (and you're silent about this, nor do you reproduce the copyright notice), this is an obvious copyright violation. I sympathize with the desire to make material like this available, especially since it would be otherwise inconvenient to get a copy, and the legal and moral risks are yours to grapple with. You should have your eyes open, however: small site operators who think they are under the radar have been financially ruined as a consequence of a single willful copyright violation.