I don’t have very organised opinions on this right now, but I thought I’d add the little data I have. I was at Oxford Uni for a total of 18 months (3 years—yeah, the term length is surprisingly short), and from the beginning I made an effort to strongly advertise to visiting EAs/rationalists that they were welcome to sleep at my place for free, at length. I’d say over the 18 months, about 4-6 of those months consisted of someone staying with me for free, consisting of some 6-10 different people and basically all of those times they were visiting either CEA or FHI.
I am surprised how much free energy I was able to give people who otherwise often would have had to spend a sizeable amount of money or time to get the same thing. This was definitely vetted by the fact that they were trusted enough in the distributed community that they were being invited to FHI/CEA, and there are definitely people I met at uni who I could’ve offered this to that I chose not to for general lack of strong feelings of safety around them.
It was positive sum for me, as it lead to meeting more senior or competent people than my level at the time. I was also more lacking in people with whom I could have interesting conversations with, and this was exciting on that front. I feel stronger on the social fronts now and probably put in less effort in analogous situations today.
Tru dat. This suggests to me a more general strategy, something like “When a billion dollar startup makes money from a secret, look if there is extra value to be gained by trading non-money for these things in places where you have higher trust.”
I don’t have very organised opinions on this right now, but I thought I’d add the little data I have. I was at Oxford Uni for a total of 18 months (3 years—yeah, the term length is surprisingly short), and from the beginning I made an effort to strongly advertise to visiting EAs/rationalists that they were welcome to sleep at my place for free, at length. I’d say over the 18 months, about 4-6 of those months consisted of someone staying with me for free, consisting of some 6-10 different people and basically all of those times they were visiting either CEA or FHI.
I am surprised how much free energy I was able to give people who otherwise often would have had to spend a sizeable amount of money or time to get the same thing. This was definitely vetted by the fact that they were trusted enough in the distributed community that they were being invited to FHI/CEA, and there are definitely people I met at uni who I could’ve offered this to that I chose not to for general lack of strong feelings of safety around them.
It was positive sum for me, as it lead to meeting more senior or competent people than my level at the time. I was also more lacking in people with whom I could have interesting conversations with, and this was exciting on that front. I feel stronger on the social fronts now and probably put in less effort in analogous situations today.
That seems like it might be one of the secrets AirBnB was built on.
Tru dat. This suggests to me a more general strategy, something like “When a billion dollar startup makes money from a secret, look if there is extra value to be gained by trading non-money for these things in places where you have higher trust.”