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Huh, upon reflection I can't figure out a good way to define reality without referring to subjective experience. I might not go so far as to say it's not a coherent concept, but you raise some interesting points.
What if you decided that, actually, apples had negative value? Then would you pretend you received negative apples?
This is precisely the issue discussed at length in Brian Tomasik's article "Two-Envelopes Problem for Uncertainty about Brain-Size Valuation and Other Moral Questions".
It would be amazing if you published a sanitized version of the LW 1.0 DB. In addition to ensuring the content is preserved, that would also make it easier for people to do interesting statistical analyses.
I wouldn't trust a redirect to archive.org, because some of the content might have randomly been missed by the Wayback Machine crawler or the last crawled version might be missing comments that were added later. It also might have systematically missed certain things, such as deeply nested comment chains where you have to click "continue this thread" and posts with a lot of replies where you have to click "load more comments" (which is even less likely to be preserved, as it relies on AJAX).
I don't have 1000 karma, but I'd like to ask something:
Are you going to keep backups of the original LW1.0 database (preferably multiple copies/locations)? I'm worried that some of the content might not have made it through the conversion to LW2.0. So far, I've noticed that old polls (both the questions and the results) are missing, and there might be other little things like that even if the main content is preserved.
I'm tempted to use wget or something like that to download all pages off LW1.0, but I don't have much memory and it could take a long time. If I knew that you were going to retain all the original data for preservation purposes, I wouldn't be as worried.